Bower and Grunt workflow

Question

I just want to get an opinion on my workflow. I am aware of Yeoman and have on purpose decided not to use it. My workflow goes like this:

1. Run bower install to install all project assets dependencies.
2. Run grunt which copies all js files from the bower components folder to a new js folder and all css files to a new css folder.
3. Further use grunt task to concatenate and minify all js and css files from the new folders and put them in a dist folder.
4. Refer to the final minified css and js in dist folder from HTML.

One thing i certainly don't want to do in my grunt task is to perform dependency specific task e.g. grab all js file from bootstrap folder into the new js folder, then grab all js file from prettyphoto folder into the new js folder. I want the grunt task to be as generic as possible so that i can use the same gruntfile in any project no matter what the bower dependencies might look like. The reason is if i should spend all those time writing my gruntfile for each project, why would i not just grab the source codes for all the dependencies in conventional way.

So there is a grunt-contrib-copy plugin to copy files from one place to another which i use to grab all js files from inside the bower's components folder. The problem is most of the bower components come with regular js and minified version of it. So, i am copying both of them and concatenating and uglifying them. So duplicate code!

Does my workflow makes sense? Is so, how can I get rid of the problem I mentioned in the paragraph above?

Answer 1

If I'm understanding correctly, you should take a look at grunt-usemin. You can wrap your js tags in <!-- build:js js/foo.js -->. The useminPrepare task that's included in the package will cycle through any scripts (or css, or images, etc.) that are there and dynamically add them to the concat or uglify task.

The one downside I've found is that the usemin task is fairly slow but hopefully if this pull request is implemented, things will get much, much faster.