grunt-shell-spawn

grunt-shell-spawn

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

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

This plugin lets you:

• Run processes synchronously or asynchronously.
• Process stdout and stderr using functions.
• Run a function when an asynchronous process ends that gets the exit code.
• Kill an asynchronous process.

Requirements

• node.js 16.x or later
• grunt 1.6 or later

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

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 processes that are not killed will continue running even after grunt finishes, unless explicitly terminated using :kill. This means it is required to use :kill to clean up any processes you started, unless you want them to continue running in the background.

Release History

• 2025-03-29 v0.5.0 Updated dependencies (grunt 1.6+, node 16+)
• 2019-05-26 v0.4.1 Updated dependencies
• 2019-01-29 v0.4.0 Added CI on Travis, AppVeyor; updated node.js engine dependency to >=4
• 2019-01-26 v0.3.12 Removed dependency on exec-sync to resolve security advisory
• 2015-01-07 v0.3.1 Fix the :kill task on UNIX and Windows
• 2013-04-06 v0.1.3 Last version with support for grunt 0.3.x

License

MIT License (c) Sindre Sorhus