grunt-dancer

Use grunt to control your Perl Dancer's development server, and live-reload with grunt-contrib-watch!

The "dancer" task

Overview

dancer:start (the default dancer task)

Launches the server and leaves it running even when the parent process is no longer running.

dancer:stop --or-- dancer:kill

Terminates an already running server.

Options

The dancer task should be configured with the following options:

Name	Type	Default	Description
pidFile	string	'/tmp/dancerServer.pid'	Path to the pid file. (REQUIRED)
debug	boolean	false	Extra logging output (OPTIONAL)
args	array	[]	Additional arguments to add to the dancer command, supplied as an array of strings. (OPTIONAL)

Getting Started

In the shell...

npm install grunt-dancer

Load it by adding this to Gruntfile.js:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-dancer');

Then add dancer to the taskList object passed into grunt.registerTask in Gruntfile.js. (example:)

    grunt.registerTask('default', [
        'concat',
        'uglify',
        'dancer',
        'watch'
    ]);

Running tests

To run the test suite, first invoke the following command within the repo, installing the development dependencies:

$ npm install

Then run the tests:

$ mocha test/test.js

With grunt-contrib-watch:

You can use this plugin with watch. This is awesome because it enables you to live-reload the dancer server when you make changes to server files (or really, any files that you specify). Here's an example of my watch config:

    watch: {
      dancer: {
        options: {
          spawn : false, // IMPORTANT. will not work without this setting.
        },
        files: [
          '/bin/app.pl'
        ],
        tasks: ['dancer'] 
      }
    },
 
//...
  grunt.registerTask('default', ['dancer', 'watch']);

The dancer task knows if watch is running, and on interrupt will kill the dancer server along with it.