Support Gruntjs tasks

[marcooliveira]

It would be great if Automaton also could take Gruntjs tasks. The goal here would be to achieve a state in which the user could invoke some grunt task just like any other autofile. From my understanding, Grunt tasks have a set of options as input, just like automaton. The main difference is that they have targets, while we simply invoke the task separate times, with separate options, if necessary.

This needs some proper planning before implementation, so if anyone wants to pick this, the first thing to do would be to discuss what you are planning to do.

[marcooliveira]

This issue is related to #1.

[sindresorhus]

See gruntjs/grunt#497 and https://github.com/tkellen/node-task for how grunt tasks might end up in grunt 0.5

[marcooliveira]

Thanks @sindresorhus! Will take a look at it as soon as possible. It would be great if we managed to get this done.

[satazor]

Just wanted to share the implementation I engineered for this issue. After investigating, grunt wasn't made to be used programatically:

• It calls process.exit, preventing others from taking control
• It calls process.stdout.write and process.stdout.writeln instead of using events or streams to pass data

I could monkey patch process.exit and process.stdout or event grunt itself, but I would be messing with sensitive stuff in a process I don't own (remember that automaton has programmatic usage).
So I made a Runner that runs grunt tasks in a separate process (using fork). It's basically a queue of grunt tasks that are consumed by a worker (the fork). This approach has several advantages:

• The necessary monkey patching is done in an isolated environment, preventing possible conflicts with other people's code.
• Allows paralel execution of grunt tasks via multiple Runner instances
• Allows better control of grunt itself

The Runner auto loads npm tasks automatically and allows to specify additional directories to load tasks from.
It's working great, will add tests later on.

[satazor]

It's done guys! :D

[satazor]

Upcoming changes to grunt will cause only the worker.js to change.

[marcooliveira]

Just wanted to say that this is just awesome! 👍

[filipediasf]

oh yeah :)