Custom options not passed along to spawn()

[panta82]

I'm having a problem with a setup like this:

grunt.initConfig({
    watch: {
        less_templates: {
            files: ["dev/styles/**/*.less"],
            tasks: ["less"]
        }
    },

    less: {
        default: {
            src: "dev/styles/app.less",
            dest: "public/styles/<%= global.assets.css.app %>"
        }
    }
});

var timestamp = grunt.option("timestamp") || String((new Date()).getTime());
grunt.option("timestamp", timestamp);
grunt.config("global.assets.css.app", "app." + timestamp + ".css");

So as you can see, I generate a timestamp used to version assets and pass it along using grunt.option mechanism.

This works nice with other modules, however not with grunt-contrib-watch. Each spawned worker is started with fresh cli arguments, instead of the ones defined in the options hash. I believe the critical spot is here (in "tasks/lib/taskrun.js"):

self.spawned = grunt.util.spawn({
        // Spawn with the grunt bin
        grunt: true,
        // Run from current working dir and inherit stdio from process
        opts: {
          cwd: self.options.cwd.spawn,
          stdio: 'inherit',
        },
        // Run grunt this process uses, append the task to be run and any cli options
        args: self.tasks.concat(self.options.cliArgs || []),
      }/*, ...*/
);

So it seems you intentionally include only the cli options and ignore the grunt.option.flags() part. Is this intentional? Or just a bug?

[shama]

It should default to all cli args passed grabbed from process.argv itself: https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-watch/blob/master/tasks/lib/taskrunner.js#L160

I'd accept a patch that merged grunt.option.flags() as well though. Thanks!

[nshew13]

This bit me, too. I have to choose between disabling spawn (which means only one watch task runs, regardless of matched files) or allowing spawns without custom config properties, which I can't do.