Question

I am working on my own boilerplate using grunt’s CLI possibilities like so grunt init:webdesign-project – for this I created a folder named webdesign-project within node_modules/grunt/init and a corresponding webdesign-project.js file. So far everything works great.

Now I wanted to insert my own “questions” with the grunt.helper function like this

grunt.helper('prompt_for', 'img_path', 'img')

however this gives me

TypeError: Cannot set property 'name' of undefined
at Object.module.exports.grunt.registerHelper.grunt.utils.spawn.cmd (/usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/tasks/init.js:573:17)
at Task.helper (/usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/lib/util/task.js:117:19)
at Object.exports.template (/usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/tasks/init/webdesign-project.js:30:11)
at Object.module.exports.grunt.registerHelper.done (/usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/tasks/init.js:240:27)
at Object.task.registerTask.thisTask.fn (/usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/lib/grunt/task.js:58:16)
at Task.<anonymous> (/usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/lib/util/task.js:341:36)
at Task.start (/usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/lib/util/task.js:357:5)
at Object.grunt.tasks (/usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/lib/grunt.js:143:8)
at Object.module.exports [as cli] (/usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/lib/grunt/cli.js:36:9)
at Object.<anonymous> (/usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/bin/grunt:19:14)

Isn’t it possible to define your own variables using this function?

EDIT: Does anybody know if a documentation for this function exists? (Couldn’t find one yet)

Answer 1

I figured out how to achieve the “custom prompt” – in case anybody is interested:

Grunt’s grunt.helper('prompt_for', '...') function apparently only takes a predefined set of values in lieu of ‘…’. Actually this should not be surprising, as there are some pretty unique features for some of those values (e.g. when you’ve entered testproject as your project’s name, “(git://github.com/peter/testproject.git)” will automatically be proposed.

Solution: Take a look at the .js file of the gruntfile template (node_modules/grunt/tasks/init/gruntfile.js) – creating a custom prompt goes like this:

{
  name: 'img_path',
  message: 'Name the folder where all image files are located',
  default: 'img',
  // warning: '' couldn't find any use for this optional property
}

instead of

grunt.helper('prompt_for', 'img_path', 'img')