Can I run Grunt.js on build server without installing dependencies in every build?

Question

I'm having some difficulty with using grunt as part of our build process. We're using a TeamCity server to run a grunt command prior to deployment. Essentially we want to be able to check in un-minified js and css and then to get Grunt to minify it for us prior to deployment.

The problem I've got is that for every build TeamCity delete's the contents of the build file system and pull's it back out of GIT (this is good as it stops old files hanging around when we don't want them). Grunt seems to insist that all dependencies are installed locally to the GruntFile.js though.

This means that for every build I have to run npm install. This takes ages and is really slowing down our deployment process (not to mention that fact that our proxy server doesn't seem to like this when run though team city...)

I would love to somehow install the dependencies globally and only download them once (they rarely change) and simply use these downloaded dependencies every time we build. But I can't seem to figure out how to do this?

I toyed with the idea of checking in the node_modules folder but then I realised this contained 8800 files :O So I would prefer not to pollute the GIT repository with this.

Here's the package.json to show what dependancies we have:

{
  "name": "name",
  "title": "title",
  "description": "description",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "engines": {
    "node": ">=0.8"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "test": "grunt assemble"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "assemble": "^0.4.42",
    "css-parse": "^1.5.3",
    "globule": "^0.2.0",
    "grunt": "~0.4.2",
    "grunt-combine-media-queries": "^1.0.19",
    "grunt-contrib-clean": "^0.6.0",
    "grunt-contrib-concat": "^0.3.0",
    "grunt-contrib-connect": "^0.6.0",
    "grunt-contrib-copy": "~0.5.0",
    "grunt-contrib-cssmin": "^0.10.0",
    "grunt-contrib-jshint": "^0.8.0",
    "grunt-contrib-less": "^0.9.0",
    "grunt-contrib-uglify": "^0.3.3",
    "grunt-contrib-watch": "^0.5.3",
    "grunt-cssshrink": "0.0.5",
    "grunt-lesslint": "^1.1.7",
    "grunt-modernizr": "^0.5.2",
    "grunt-prettify": "^0.3.5",
    "grunt-replace": "^0.6.2",
    "grunt-stripmq": "0.0.3",
    "handlebars-helper-repeat": "^0.2.0",
    "load-grunt-tasks": "^0.2.1",
    "pretty": "^0.1.2",
    "time-grunt": "^0.2.10"
  },
  "keywords": [
    "assemble",
    "templates",
    "handlebars",
    "site generator",
    "site builder",
    "grunt"
  ]
}

I didn't actually set this up and most of my knowledge of grunt, node stems from a couple of days research so I'm not 100% sure why this is configured as it is. Open to better suggestions if something is startlingly wrong?

yes it s better to re install on each and every build. Now, if it s really slow, and assuming it s a network issue, how about setting up your own npm cache server on your lan ? http://willcodefor.beer/setup-your-own-npm-cache-server/ — , May 12 '16 at 13:54
TBH, I've given up on grunt, its 56Mb of dependencies that are so big the windows file system won't let me view some of them! I'm just going to run YuiCompress from powershell and be done with it. — Liam, May 12 '16 at 14:08

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 13 '16 at 07:15

You might actually want to configure Artifact dependencies.

By this I mean; you may create a separate build configuration, which does two things:

npm install to fetch over all the 8K files
saves the node_modules folder as an artifact (packed as an archive, why not?)

This configuration could then have some trigger rules configured to start the build when something changes in the package.json file.

Then your main configuration, which you have at the moment, becomes dependent on the first one. It will then have Artifacts rules configured to fetch node_modules, and that's it.

Can I run Grunt.js on build server without installing dependencies in every build?

1 Answers1