Grunt browser error

A Grunt plugin to display compile errors directly in your browser. The error tab is closed when the failing task(s) succeed.

Disclaimer

This module is still very experimental. Contributions are very welcome.

Installation

Just run

npm install --save-dev grunt-brerror

and you are done.

Screencast

Usage

You need to run the task brerror:server before anything. This tasks blocks, so you must run it using grunt-concurrent or something similar.

After, just prepend brerror: to the task for which you want to display errros in your browser.

Here is a sample configuration.

module.exports = (grunt) ->
  grunt.initConfig
    watch:
      scripts:
        files: 'src/**/*.coffee'
        tasks: ['brerror:coffee:dev']

    coffee:
      dev:
        files: [
          expand: true
          src: ['src/**/*.coffee']
          dest: 'js'
          ext: '.js'
        ]

    concurrent:
      default:
        tasks: ['watch', 'brerror:server']
        options:
          logConcurrentOutput: true

    grunt.loadNpmTasks 'grunt-contrib-watch'
    grunt.loadNpmTasks 'grunt-contrib-coffee'
    grunt.loadNpmTasks 'grunt-concurrent'
    grunt.loadNpmTasks 'grunt-brerror'

    grunt.registerTask 'default', ['concurrent:default']

How does it work

This module uses websockets for IPC and to close the browser tabs.

The brerror:server task runs the websocket server. During the brerror task, a connection is made after the build, and the status of the build is sent with the output. The output is collected by hooking grunt.log methods.

The server then closes the tab with websokets, and displays the error page when necessary.

Known limitations

• Does not seem to work with spawn: false for watch task
• Probably buggy if compile tasks are run concurrently