What's the right way to integrate Grunt into a Spring/Gradle build?

Question

I have a Spring Boot project that is built with Gradle. All my front-end code lives under src/main/resources/static. This also includes my bower_components, node_modules (for Grunt tasks), etc.

Right now, I have my main Gradle build script exec the Grunt build, which concatenates/minifies all my JavaScript, and they go under src/main/resources/static/dist. Then, when processResources gets executed in Gradle, the entire src/main/resources/static/dist gets copied to the build directory. This doesn't seem right to me - the only stuff that should end up in the build directory are the concatenated/minified JS, CSS, HTML and images.

I've searched high and low but haven't found any clear direction here. Is there a best practice for building a project in this way?

Answer 1

Files generated as part of the build shouldn't go into src, but somewhere under the build directory (say build/grunt). What's left is to include them in archives as necessary. For example:

war.dependsOn(grunt)
war {
    from "build/grunt"
}

Or, if the Grunt task declares it outputs:

war {
    from grunt
}