Accessing command line arguments with Grunt

I needed to be able to set up a watch task with Grunt to only watch a specific client sub directory. This directory would change depending on the client I was working on and new clients were constantly added so I need a way to watch the specific client that I was working on only, without hard coding all the clients into separate tasks. The only thing I could think of doing this was to pass some sort of parameters when starting the watch task.

This is how I set it up. It might not be the best method but it works for me.

First I had to set a value in the grunt configuration, which would be taken from the command line args. With Grunt you can get them them using:

grunt.option('someCommandLineArg');

You can also set a configuration value using:

grunt.config.set('myValue', 'someValue');

So combining those two methods, the following will get a command line arg called “watchDir” (and assign a default value of src if it was not specified) and set it in the grunt config. I added this line after initConfig in my Gruntfile:

grunt.config.set('watchDir', grunt.option('watchDir') || 'src');

You can then access this property using a template string in your task:

watch: {
  less: {
   files: ['clients/&lt;%= watchDir %&gt;/**/*.less'],
   tasks: ['less']
  }
}

When running the Grunt task, we can specify the option “watchDir” by adding two dashes in front and setting it equal to the desired value:

grunt watch --watchDir="clientX"

The watch task above would in this case watch the following directory:

'clients/clientX/**/*.less'

This allows you to set up a generic task that can be pointed to different directories when it is started.