run-grunt-tasks-from-gulp.md

Run Grunt Tasks from Gulp

It is possible to run Grunt tasks / Grunt plugins from within Gulp. This can be useful during a gradual migration from Grunt to Gulp or if there's a specific plugin that you need. With the described approach no Grunt CLI and no Gruntfile is required.

This approach requires Grunt >=1.0.0

very simple example gulpfile.js:

// npm install gulp@next grunt grunt-contrib-copy --save-dev

var gulp = require('gulp');
var grunt = require('grunt');

grunt.initConfig({
    copy: {
        main: {
            src: 'src/*',
            dest: 'dest/'
        }
    }
});
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-copy');

gulp.task('copy', function (done) {
    grunt.tasks(
        ['copy:main'],    //you can add more grunt tasks in this array
        {gruntfile: false}, //don't look for a Gruntfile - there is none. :-)
        function () {done();}
    );
});

Now start the task with: gulp copy

With the aforementioned approach the grunt tasks get registered within gulp's task system. Keep in mind grunt tasks are usually blocking (unlike gulp), therefore no other task (not even a gulp task) can run until a grunt task is completed.

A few words on alternatives

There's a gulpfriendly node module gulp-grunt available which takes a different approach. It spawns child processes and within them the grunt tasks are executed. The way it works implies some limitations though:

• It is at the moment not possible to pass options / cli args etc. to the grunt tasks via gulp-grunt
• All grunt tasks have to be defined in a separate Gruntfile
• You need to have the Grunt CLI installed
• The output of some grunt tasks gets malformatted (.i.e. color coding).