Question

Working on a gruntjs ‘Hello World’ project, and there doesn’t seem to be an optimal place to install a grunt task. Say, for instance, that I want to start compiling coffeescript, I would need the ‘grunt-coffee’ task installed.

Option 1: Install it right into my src tree

This seems to be the way grunt would like you to do it, and it works.

cd $MY_PROJECT_HOME
npm install grunt-coffee
grunt coffee

However, this adds 7.2mg to my project tree. I don’t want to put it in my src control, but if I remove it, grunt will not build my project. I could .gitignore it, but then others that download the repository cannot build without doing the same installations. This also gets a bit messy for CI servers.

Option 2: Install it globally

cd $MY_PROJECT_HOME
npm install -g grunt-coffee
grunt coffee

Grunt can’t find my plugins if I install them this way:

Local Npm module "grunt-coffee" not found. Is it installed?

It’s not clear to me why this wouldn’t be supported.

Option 3: Install them somewhere else?

Grunt has an api method called loadTasks, which loads tasks locally. I tried pulling down the npms and moving them myself into a custom directory that I referenced here, with no luck. EG

grunt.loadTasks('$SHARED_TASKS_FOR_ALL_MY_GRUNT_PROJECTS/node_modules/grunt-coffee')

and then:

cd $SHARED_TASKS_FOR_ALL_MY_GRUNT_PROJECTS
npm install grunt-coffee
cd $MY_PROJECT_HOME
grunt coffee

Task "coffee" not found. Use --force to continue.

Option 4: Grunt, in its loadNpmTasks call, pulls down dependencies for me in a .grunt directory somewhere

That’d be nice… 🙂

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EDIT

Sindre below is correct. Option 1 is the way to go, but there is one part missing – the package.json file. So:

• Add a package.json file and put all of your grunt project’s dependencies in there.
• Ensure that node_modules is .gitignore-ed.
• In your README, give some instructions to run npm install (note, no arguments) upon a clone or if they add dependencies to the build file.

Answer 1

First option is the correct way. You don’t commit the node_modules folder, but instead just instruct users to do npm install which fetches all the required dependencies.