grunt watch not compiling all sass files despite being "watched"

Question

Basically at the moment I have 2 issues that I can't seem to find answers to. When I save my main styles.scss , sass compiles ok, though when I save either _globals.scss or any other scss file, grunt watch seems to detect the change, but it doesn't compile! What would I need to do to rectify this?

My 2nd issue is when I have got a scss file in a directory within the scss folder for example: pages/_gallery.scss (which is being imported in the main styles.scss ), grunt watch doesn't see it, I understand this is because of probably because of my cwd path, though how do I make this more generic?

Here is my Gruntfile.js:

module.exports = function(grunt) {

  // Project configuration.
  grunt.initConfig({

    pkg: grunt.file.readJSON('package.json'),

    watch: {
      scripts: {
        files: ['public/resources/site/js/*.js'],
        tasks: ['newer:jshint', 'newer:uglify:dist'],
        options: {
          spawn: false,
          livereload: true,
        },
      },
      sass: {
        files: ['public/resources/site/scss/*.scss'],
        tasks: ['newer:sass:app'],
        options: {
          livereload: true
        }
      },
      php:{
          files: ['public/index.php'],
          options: {
            livereload: true
          }
      }
    },
    sass: {
      app: {
        files: [{
          expand: true,
          cwd: 'public/resources/site/scss/',
          src: ['*.scss'],
          dest: 'public/resources/site/css/',
          ext: '.css'
        }]
      },
      options: {
        sourceMap: true,
        outputStyle: 'compressed'
      }
    },
    uglify: {
      dist: {
        options: {
          sourceMap: true,
          mangle: true
        },
        files: [{
          expand: true,
          cwd: 'public/resources/site/js/',
          src: ['*.js'],
          dest: 'public/resources/site/js/',
          ext: '.min.js'
        }]
      }
    },
    jshint: {
      options: {
        force: true
      },
      files: [
          'public/resources/site/js/*.js',
          '!public/resources/site/js/*.min.js'
      ]
    },
    notify: {
      watch: {
        options: {
          title: 'Tasks Complete',
          message: 'Files Processed & Compiled',
        }
      }
    }
  });

  // Load tasks
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-watch');
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-jshint');
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-uglify');
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-imagemin');
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-newer');
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-sass');
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-notify');

  // Default task(s).
  grunt.registerTask('default', []);

  grunt.task.run('notify_hooks');

};

Answer 1

To make subdirectories work you need a globbing pattern ;

'public/resources/site/scss/**/*.scss'

I think that your watch task is flawed due to newer . Watch detects a change to _globals , but the sass task knows only to compile the main styles.scss . However, newer sees that this file has not changed, so it does not run the step.

Try removing newer from the watch task list.