Automatically loading Grunt tasks with matchdep

11th March 2014 | by Adam Beres-Deak | javascript, node.js, grunt

Have you ever installed a new GruntJS-plugin and then forgotten to load it as a task in the gruntfile.js? Matchdep is a handy tool, which can solve this issue.

What is matchdep?

Matchdep is a tool which can filter node.js dependencies, which are in the package.json file.

Installing it is very easy: npm install --save matchdep

Automatically loading GruntJS tasks

require('matchdep').filterDev('grunt-*').forEach(grunt.loadNpmTasks);

What we are doing here is: basically reading all (dev)dependencies from the package.json and filtering those out which begin with 'grunt-'. These are tasks like all Grunt contrib tasks (grunt-contrib-concat, grunt-contrib-less, grunt-contrib-copy, etc.) and other Grunt specific tasks (like grunt-browserify or grunt-hashres). After filtering we load them as tasks.