grunt-direct-express

Async Grunt task to call express with a configurable directory/webpath assignment.

You can start express from Grunt as an async task, but without forking a new node. It will run parallel with the other tasks if needed.

You can set an option to use a "press enter to stop express" feature (in this case, of course also the task won't end until you don't press enter).

An example:

module.exports = function(grunt) {
  'use strict';
  grunt.initConfig({
  
    express : {

      dev : {
        options : {
          port : 8080,
          paths : [{
            type : "redirect",
            web : "/",
            status : 302,
            to : "/index.html"
          }, {
            type : "static",
            web : "/",
            fs: "./dev"
          }],
          keepalive : true,
          keepaliveKeypressenter : true
        }
      },

      dist : {
        options : {
          port : 8081,
          paths : [{
            type : "redirect",
            web : "/",
            status : 302,
            to : "/index.html"
          }, {
            type : "static",
            web : "/",
            fs : "./dist"
          }],
          keepalive : true,
          keepaliveKeypressenter : true
        }
      }

    }
  }
  grunt.loadNpmTasks("grunt-direct-express");
};

Explanation:

We define here two express tasks, a "dev" and a "dist" one. Grunt with express:dev and express:dist will start an express instance using the corresponding configuration.

All configuration is inside an "options:" element in the Grunt JSON, it is an unfortunate syntactical limitation of the Grunt.

The valid options are these:

• port : we define the port on which express will listen(). The IP is always the default 0.0.0.0 (listen on all IPs). On the need it would be easy to change.
• keepalive : in nearly all the cases, it should be true. It is because this flag converts the task into an asynchronous one. It also means, that the task won't end.
• keepaliveKeypressenter : works only if keepalive is true. We will see a "Press enter to stop express" message, and express will run until we won't press enter. If we press, express will stop, and the asynchronous Grunt task will be solved ( see async.done() in Grunt docs).
• Paths : an array of the paths (web url - directory assigments). See next chapter.

Path definitions

Actually, we have 2 path types:

• redirect types, these send http 30* redirects on access. They work only on exact match, not for subdirectories. Both of them are self-explanatory in the Gruntfile example.
• static types, these simply send the files what they were asked for.

Note: redirect works only on exact matches and on GET queries, while static follow a prefix match!