grunt-direct-express

Async Grunt task to call express with a configurable directory/webpath assignment.

You can start express from Grunt as an async task, but without forking a new node. It will
run parallel with the other tasks if needed.

You can set an option to use a "press enter to stop express" feature (in this case,
of course also the task won't end until you don't press enter).

An example:

module.exports = function(grunt) {
'use strict';
grunt.initConfig({

express : {

dev : {
options : {
port : 8080,
paths : [{
type : "redirect",
web : "/",
status : 302,
to : "/index.html"
}, {
type : "static",
web : "/",
fs: "./dev"
}],
keepalive : true,
keepaliveKeypressenter : true
}
},

dist : {
options : {
port : 8081,
paths : [{
type : "redirect",
web : "/",
status : 302,
to : "/index.html"
}, {
type : "static",
web : "/",
fs : "./dist"
}],
keepalive : true,
keepaliveKeypressenter : true
}
}

}
}
grunt.loadNpmTasks("grunt-direct-express");
};

Explanation:

We define here two express tasks, a "dev" and a "dist" one. Grunt with
express:dev and express:dist will start an express instance using the
corresponding configuration.

All configuration is inside an "options:" element in the Grunt JSON, it is
an unfortunate syntactical limitation of the Grunt.

The valid options are these:

* port : we define the port on which express will listen(). The IP is always
the default 0.0.0.0 (listen on all IPs). On the need it would be
easy to change.
* keepalive : in nearly all the cases, it should be true. It is because
this flag converts the task into an asynchronous one. **It also
means, that the task won't end**.
* keepaliveKeypressenter : works only if keepalive is true. We will see a
"Press enter to stop express" message, and express
will run until we won't press enter. If we press,
express will stop, and the asynchronous Grunt task
will be solved ( see async.done() in Grunt docs).
* Paths : an array of the paths (web url - directory assigments). See next chapter.

Path definitions

Actually, we have 2 path types:

redirect types, these send http 30\ redirects on access. They work only on
exact match, not for subdirectories. Both of them are self-explanatory in
the Gruntfile example.
static* types, these simply send the files what they were asked for.

Note: redirect works only on exact matches and on GET queries, while static
follow a prefix match!