Using Grunt to watch all files in my src directory and output to build

Question

I'm completely new to Grunt and I want to use it in my next project.

What I want to do is, for example, to have the file at src/server.coffee to be compiled to build/server.js and the file at src/public/assets/css/global.less to be compiled to build/public/assets/css/global.css .

That means I want to keep the same file path after src , as well as the same name of every file, only changing its extension. I can do this manually for every file in my project but I'd really like Grunt to do this with every file in the src folder.

How can I get this done?

Answer 1

It seems I found the answer in the docs -- I just didn't know how to look for it.

What I want to do is called globbing : setting global routines for the Gruntfile. It looks like this (in CoffeeScript):

module.exports = (grunt) ->
    grunt.initConfig
        pkg: grunt.file.readJSON "package.json"

        coffee:
            files:
                expand: true
                cwd: "src/"
                flatten: false
                src: ["**/*.coffee"]
                dest: "build/"
                ext: ".js"

        less:
            files:
                expand: true
                cwd: "src/"
                flatten: false
                src: ["**/*.less"]
                dest: "build/"
                ext: ".css"


    grunt.loadNpmTasks 'grunt-contrib-coffee'
    grunt.loadNpmTasks 'grunt-contrib-less'

    grunt.registerTask 'default', ['coffee', 'less'];

    return

cwd sets the base directory, flatten: false makes Grunt respect subdirectory structure and [src: "**/*.coffee"] makes it look for every .coffee file in every subdirectory of the cwd . The output goes to the dest folder.