How to run grunt server in dist directory instead of app directory?

Question

The very short answer is

grunt serve:dist

That works with my yeoman-generated Gruntfile.js which contains:

  grunt.registerTask('serve', function (target) {
    if (target === 'dist') {
      return grunt.task.run(['build', 'connect:dist:keepalive']);
    }

    grunt.task.run([
      'clean:server',
      'bower-install',
      'concurrent:server',
      'autoprefixer',
      'connect:livereload',
      'watch'
    ]);
  });

Whether or not you could do it isn't important. What is important is that you should not use grunt server for this. The server task in grunt as you can see does many things that you don't need in a dist folder, as well as the fact that they will all be hard coded for your app folder.

If you just want to try out the result of the dist folder, what you should do is just cd into the dist directory and then start a simple HTTP server like the one that comes with python.

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

That should start a small server for you to try the dist directory out.

Although other have not advised doing this, I believe this is what you are looking for. I do something like this in my server.js file when using express.

if (process.env.NODE_ENV == 'production') {
    app.use(express.static('/dist'));
}else{
    app.use(express.static('/app'));       
}

Hope this helps!

The grunt serve:dist answer is the correct one, but the process is quite annoying because you need to compile your whole project into production mode every time you call grunt serve:dist.

What I did is I modified the Gruntfile.js in the serve task, removing the build task from the parameter sent to run. You need to manually build first with grunt or grunt build and then call grunt serve:dist and manually open the URL.