grunt-recursively-load-tasks

A simple "plugin" for grunt that allows you to load modules from parent directories as npm does.

Introduction

Even though grunt uses npm to manage contribution packages they differ in an important aspect: while require() in node recursively loads packages from node_modules folders that might also be located in parent directories, the grunt task loader functions consider local package installations only.

While this seems reasonable, there are a couple of project types that need to manage build dependencies globally and do not work with the way grunt loads tasks.

This package addresses this problem by extending grunt by a function that tries to load tasks recursively.

Installation

The package can be installed with npm

npm install grunt-recursively-load-tasks

Usage

Require the package in your Gruntfile.js and throw grunt in it. This usually looks this way:

module.exports = function(grunt) {
    require('grunt-recursively-load-tasks')(grunt);
};

After that, the function grunt.recursivelyLoadTasks is exposed which takes three arguments:

grunt.recursivelyLoadTasks(taskname, directory, depth)

• taskname is the name of the task to load (e.g. grunt-hub)
• directory is the directory to start searching for node_modules folders, by default this is the current directory
• depth is a number indication the levels of parent folders to consider, by default this is 10

You then can load tasks that are located in a parent's node_modules folder this way:

grunt.recursivelyLoadTasks('grunt-whatever');
grunt.recursivelyLoadTasks('grunt-whatever','/tmp/a/b/c');
grunt.recursivelyLoadTasks('grunt-whatever','/home/user/me/',2);