grunt-hash-required

Add a unique hash to a file, and update requirejs paths to cache-busted paths.

Why?

Assuming you are already familiar with grunt-hash, this plugin adds functionality on top of, and is intended to be a drop-in replacement of grunt-hash. grunt-hash, while a great plugin, I found didn't work well with RequireJS. My css and js assets would have a cache-busting path, but my require configuration would have no idea what those new paths were.

By reading the RequireJS configuration file itself, we can update the paths as we rename them, and we get the added benefit of only hashing the js files we actually use (as negligible an optimization as that is).

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.5

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-hash-required --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-hash-required');

The "hash_require" task

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named hash_require to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
    'hash_require': {
            options: {
                mapping: 'assets/assets.json',
                srcBasePath: '',
                destBasePath: '',
                flatten: true,
                prepend: true,
                clean: true
            },
            require_js: {
                configPath: 'assets/js/config.js', // RequireJS config path
                dest: '/assets/build'
            },
            css: {
                src: ['assets/build/**/*.css'],  //all your css that needs a hash appended to it
                dest: 'assets/build' //where the new files will be created
            } 
    },
});

require_js

grunt-hash-required uses a specific task called require_js to parse all of your dependency paths, add a cache-bust hash to those files, and update the built configuration file to point to those newly hashed files.