Unable to put Sails.js app in production

Question

I'm trying to put my app into production with Sails.js, but cannot get past the grunt tasks. This is the error I'm receiving:

error: Error: The hook `grunt` is taking too long to load.
Make sure it is triggering its `initialize()` callback, or else set 
`sails.config.grunt._hookTimeout to a higher value (currently 20000)
at tooLong [as _onTimeout] 
   (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/sails/lib/app/private/loadHooks.js:92:21)
   at Timer.listOnTimeout (timers.js:110:15)

I have increased sails.config.grunt._hookTimeout dramatically and still the process hasn't been completed. Running a sails debug in either production or development outputs:

Grunt :: Error: listen EADDRINUSE
   at exports._errnoException (util.js:746:11)
   at Agent.Server._listen2 (net.js:1156:14)
   at listen (net.js:1182:10)
   at Agent.Server.listen (net.js:1267:5)
   at Object.start (_debugger_agent.js:20:9)
   at startup (node.js:86:9)
   at node.js:814:3

I find it very strange that in development mode everything works fine, but its not the case in production. The files included are pretty big, such as angular, moment and other modules. This is how the jsFilesToInject looks:

var jsFilesToInject = [

 // Load sails.io before everything else
 'js/dependencies/sails.io.js',

 'js/dependencies/angular.min.js',
 'js/dependencies/moment.min.js',
 'js/dependencies/angular-ui-router.min.js',
 'js/dependencies/angular-sails.min.js',
 'js/dependencies/angular-moment.min.js',
 'js/dependencies/angular-animate.min.js',
 'js/dependencies/angular-aria.min.js',
 'js/dependencies/angular-material.min.js',

 // All of the rest of your client-side js files
 // will be injected here in no particular order.
 'js/**/*.js'

];

I'm not sure what else would be causing this, any suggestions? I'm using Sails version 0.11.0

Answer 1

I just had this same problem and it was just that the timeout was not big enough I had to put this in my config/local.js file:

module.exports = {
    hookTimeout: 120000
};

Answer 2

I just posted the same issue on github, and then checked out the source code. So I read through the grunt hook to understand what happens. And it turns out that in default mode the grunt hook triggers the callback right after grunt has started, but for the prod mode it is triggered only when grunt has finished all the tasks.

There is a following comment in the source code:

cb - optional, fires when the Grunt task has been started (non-production) or finished (production)

So if there is anything watching (like using watch in browserify) in prod, grunt task will never exit, and therefore grunt hook will always timeout. But even if nothing is watching, starting the grunt task takes much longer that finishing all the tasks, and this explains why we don't see the problem when not in production mode. Since modifying the original grunt hook is not the best idea (it lives in node_modules), the best is indeed to increase (possibly dramatically) the _hookTimeout option and to make sure grunt task exits (for this it can be run separately with grunt prod).