NodeBB Grunt

This Grunt-Setup simplifies the creation and development workflow on NodeBB plugins, themes and widgets (further called modules).

Features

• Interactive NodeBB setup for new plugins, themes and widgets.
• Non-tracked configuration files (config/**/*.local.json).
• Allows simple meta-replacements while compilation to keep consistency of data like version, name, etc.
• Native support for CoffeeScript- and TypeScript-projects with in-place compilation.
• Default setups for applying code-style and structural conventions chosen by NodeBB module developers.
• Easy to extend grunt-task structure that allows you to add custom compilers if needed.

Tasks

Grunt tasks may be run from command-line like grunt task-name:argument.

The most interesting tasks you need to know ( my-module may either be the name or an alias of any existing module):

Task definition	Meaning
config	Initial setup of configuration (e.g. default value for author and GitHub username, etc.)
init (default task)	Setup a new module.
dev:my-module	Run development-compilation of my-module and start blocking file-watchers.
dev_stop:my-module	Run development-compilation of my-module (without file-watchers).
dev_skip:my-module	Run file-watchers for my-module (without preceding development-compilation).
build:my-module	Run distribution compilation of my-module
publish:my-module	Publish my-module as specified for my-module (npm and git via default config).
deploy:my-module	Run distribution compilation of my-module and publish (alias for build and publish).
clean	Clean temporary data.

Note: For the publish task you need to be running a real shell to be able to use git commit -e for commit message input since. The task-manager of your IDE may not provide this (e.g. JetBrains IDEA does not).

TODO

• Basic plugin-, theme- and widgets-setups
• Excessive use of ES6 features within plugin-babel setup
• Save necessary meta within module source dir to import a project into nodebb-grunt (type-definition)
• Create wiki step-by-step guides for
  • NodeBB Grunt setup
  • Module setup creation (incl. what to keep in mind regarding ${x}, @{x} and @{>x})
• Wiki: list sample meta-replace variables (for init- and compile-time)
• Add defaults for Linter configurations
• Use https://www.npmjs.com/package/ignore (fork, add https://github.com/grob/fnmatch rules - maybe skip {x..y} for simplicity) for detection of files to copy into tmp- (.gitignore and ".git*") and dest- (.npmignore or .gitignore and ".git*") directories
• Basic plugin-, theme- and widgets-setups with TypeScript-, CoffeeScript- and SASS-usage
• A smart clean-task that accepts module-id as parameter
• Allow different setups for same type (additional setup-selection within init-task)
• Save last npm published version to throw an early error within publish task
• Some tasks for adding git-providers and other config-modifications
• Figure out why "preserveComments": "some" in options of minify-task doesn't work properly (does preserve "all" comments)