Why use ~/.grunt-init?

[NickHeiner]

Why must the templates be installed in ~/.grunt-init? Can't they be bundled with the task itself, like how yeoman generators do it? It seems like this adds an unnecessary step to someone using my grunt init task.

[cowboy]

What do you mean by, "Can't they be bundled with the task itself" ? I don't understand. These are templates, there are no tasks.

[NickHeiner]

Ah, good point. I hadn't realized that grunt-init-* projects weren't just tasks.

I think it would be nicer if the workflow were more like:

$ npm install grunt-init
$ npm install grunt-init-foo

instead of having to mess with a directory that is global to all projects, and potentially deal with headaches when you want to be using different versions of grunt-init-foo with different projects.

[cowboy]

But grunt-init templates aren't npm modules, so we don't publish them with npm. Also, when you do "npm install" you install modules locally to a project... but one of the ideas of grunt-init is that it works to initialize projects. It's a "chicken and egg" problem.

[NickHeiner]

Hmm... perhaps I'm thinking about grunt init wrong. I was thinking of it as a task, because as part of my build process I want to generate certain templated scaffolding files. Perhaps I should just be using a task instead of grunt init?

[cowboy]

You should be able to include the template files somewhere locally and specify grunt-init ./path/to/template.

[dylang]

I appreciate that they are git projects to make it easy to have custom forks but I've found that to be something I just don't care to do. For me having the latest template is a higher priority than a custom template.

The NPM workflow seems pretty standard in the Node world, something like: npm -g install grunt-init grunt-init-gruntfile; grunt-init gruntfile. And npm -g update to get the latest versions of the templates.

I have nothing against git, I use it for everything, but it seems off-putting to make Git a requirement to use grunt templates. If I need something more custom I would clone the project and use npm link.

[billyvg]

Is there a way to load grunt-init as a task? Take this scenario, you want to generate a new Model file within an existing project. You want the templates to be within your project directory: ./project/.grunt-init/templates/model or something. It would be nice to be able to load grunt-init as a task so we can easily grunt init model within the project directory.

[cowboy]

Unfortunately, no.

[NickHeiner]

@billyvg if you're in to that, you might want to check out yeoman generators. http://yeoman.io/