grunt-pathfinder

Find files and process their paths in a template.

Getting Started

If you haven't used grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide.

From the same directory as your project's Gruntfile and package.json, install this plugin with the following command:

npm install grunt-pathfinder --save-dev

Once that's done, add this line to your project's Gruntfile:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-pathfinder');

If the plugin has been installed correctly, running grunt --help at the command line should list the newly-installed plugin's task or tasks. In addition, the plugin should be listed in package.json as a devDependency, which ensures that it will be installed whenever the npm install command is run.

Overview

Inside your Gruntfile, add a section named pathfinder. This section specifies the groups of file (paths), the template to which the found filepaths are passed to and the output file (compiled template).

grunt.initConfig({
  pathfinder: {
    indexhtml: {
      paths: {
        css: ['dir/**/*.css', 'also/this/other.css'],
        js: ['scripts/**/*.js']
      },
      template: 'template/index.html',
      output: 'dist/index.html'
    }
  }
});

Settings

There are a number of options available. Please review the minimatch options here. As well as some additional options as follows:

paths

Type: object

key:value pairs that describes group:pattern. The name of the group is also the variable name that is available in the template. Hence, you can have multiple groups and multiple variables available in your template. The pattern is a minimatch pattern. The found files are stores as filepaths in the array variable (group).

template

Type: String

The template file will be parsed using grunt.template and the found file paths will be passed as data. The paths array is available in your template file.

output

Type: String

To which file the compiled template will be saved to.

Events

grunt-pathfinder emits and events using grunt.event.emit called pathfinder-paths. If you listen on this event, you can manipulate the paths array (e.g. filter it) and save it before it gets passed to the template. A use case of this is the [importless][] example config in the Gruntfile.