grunt-rsync

A Grunt multitask for accessing the file copying and syncing capabilities of the rsync command line utility. Uses the rsyncwrapper npm module for the core functionality.

Prerequisites

A reasonably modern version of rsync (>=2.6.9) in your PATH.

Installation

$ npm install grunt-rsync

Usage

Add a rsync object to your Grunt config and grunt.loadNpmTasks("grunt-rsync").

All options defined in the config are passed verbatim to rsyncwrapper, so check that project's readme for more details on the possible options.

For example, the following task config defines three targets. The dist target could be used to create a distribution of a website ready for deployment, excluding files related to Git and uncompiled SCSS. The deploy-staging and deploy-live targets could be used to copy the distribution to the relevant remote hosts over ssh.

rsync: {
    dist: {
        src: "./",
        dest: "../dist",
        recursive: true,
        exclude: [".git*","*.scss"]
    },
    deploy-staging: {
        src: "../dist/",
        dest: "/var/www/site",
        host: "user@staging-host",
        recursive: true,
        syncDest: true
    },
    deploy-live: {
        src: "../dist/",
        dest: "/var/www/site",
        host: "user@live-host",
        recursive: true,
        syncDest: true
    }
}

Wildcards, exclude patterns, globbing etc.

Any wildcards, exclude patterns and globbing of paths are handled by rsync itself. So importantly this task does not use Grunt's in-built path expanding and globbing at all. For more information on rsync's sytax check the rsync manpages. For information about how this task's options relate to rsync's functionality check rsyncwrapper.

Testing

Basic tests are run on Vows Async BDD via this package's Gruntfile. To test grunt-rsync clone the repo and ensure that the devDependancies are present. Additionally ensure that Grunt and Vows are installed globally, and then invoke:

$ npm test