grunt-shell-spawn

A fork on sindresorhus's grunt-shell with support for background processes.

(e.g.: start a compass watch in the background)

---

This plugin requires grunt >= 0.4.x. For grunt 0.3.x, use version 0.1.3.

Install

npm install grunt-shell-spawn --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-shell-spawn');

Examples

Simple task:

Let's take for example launching a compass watch in background:

shell: {
    command: 'compass watch',
    options: {
        async: true
    }
}

Multitask:

shell: {
    compassWatch: {
        command: 'compass watch',
        options: {
            async: true,
            execOptions: {
                cwd: './src/www/'
           }
       }
    },
    coffeeCompile: {
        command: 'coffee -b -c -o /out /src',
        options: {
            async: false,
            execOptions: {
                cwd: './src/www/'
            }
        }
    },
    options: {
        stdout: true,
        stderr: true,
        failOnError: true
    }
}

Custom callbacks:

Works in synchronous or asynchronous mode.

    asyncWithCallbacks: {
        command: 'sleep 3 & echo HELLO & sleep 1 & echo WORLD & sleep 2',
        options: {
            async: true,
            stdout: function(data) { /* ... */ },
            stderr: function(data) { /* ... */ },
            callback: function(exitCode, stdOutStr, stdErrStr, done) { 
                done();
            }
        }
    }, 

Killing an async process

(Not available on Windows.)

Stop a running async task with the :kill task argument.

    server: {
        command: 'redis-server',
        options: {
            async: true,
        }
    },

grunt shell:server shell:somethingElse shell:server:kill

The process will be killed with a SIGKILL.

Please note that the processes are spawned with child_process.spawn, and by default an async process will be terminated when grunt finishes. This means it is not required to use :kill to clean up processes after your task completes.

If you want a process to be kept running after grunt completes, you can pass the detached: true in execOptions:

options: {
    execOptions: { detached: true }
}

License

MIT License (c) Sindre Sorhus