Question

I am working on grunt for making building tool, till now I was putting src and dest addresses directly in my grunt.js file but in this case if I want to change my dest I have to change in every task of file which is not a good practice.for example if my grunt.js file have following task:

concat: {
  js: {
    src: 'src/js/*.js',
    dest: 'dest/js/concat.js'
  },
  css: {
    src: 'src/css/*.css',
    dest: 'dest/css/concat.css'
  }
},
min: {
  js: {
    src: 'dest/js/concat.js',
    dest: 'dest/js/concat.min.js'
  }
},

here if I change my address than i have to change in every place!!!
I want a JSON file in which I can declare src and dest and call in my grunt.js file. How can we do that???

Answer 1

You could add a property to package.json to declare metadata, for example

{
   "name": "test",
   "meta":{
     "src":"someSrcFolder",
     "dest":"someDestFolder"
   },
 ....
}

Then in your Gruntfile.js, you could read those properties like this

grunt.initConfig({
  pkg: '<json:package.json>',
  concat: {
    js: {
      src: '<%= pkg.meta.src %>/js/*.js',
      dest: '<%= pkg.meta.dest %>/js/concat.js'
    },
    css: {
      src: '<%= pkg.meta.src %>/css/*.css',
      dest: '<%= pkg.meta.dest %>/css/concat.css'
    }
  }
});

The important bits are pkg:<json:package.json> which loads the json file into memory and the underscore template interpolations <%= pkg.meta.src %> which evaluate to the contents of the meta property added to the json file.

Keep in mind that the Gruntfile is just a JavaScript file so you could also have an object with references to paths and then interpolate them into your tasks.