Yeoman to use google app engine server

Question

I setup Yeoman 1.0 beta to handle my js/css tasks. Everything works fine that, if I run grunt server, it starts up a static server and connects a browser session to port 9000 (livereload). js/css concat, minification are also working.

Now, is there a way I can make it to connect to a google app engine development server (instead of starting a static server). The server is running at port 8080 on localhost, and I want grunt to reload the webpage upon css/js files under watch. These files would be served by GAE server.

I see a section rolling your own at grunt-contrib-connect documentation, but not sure it means an external server. As far as I see, these are the relavent configuration from Gruntfile.js

connect: {
      livereload: {
        options: {
          port: 8080, //*** was 9001 originally ** 
          middleware: function (connect) {
            return [
              lrSnippet,
              mountFolder(connect, '.tmp'),
              mountFolder(connect, yeomanConfig.app)
            ];
          }
        }
      },

When I change the port number to 8080, and try to start, obviously it gives error.

Fatal error: Port 8080 is already in use by another process.

so, I don't want to start a new server, but connect through GAE server already running.

Thanks.

Answer 1

In order to use GAE server instead of nodejs server, we need to do the following.
* Compile your less/coffeescript, concat[, minify], copy your code to the location where the app engine code resides.
* Create a task in grunt.js to spawn a shell command to run app engine.

This is the example, that I used as reference. https://github.com/cowboy/grunt/tree/master/tasks

Following grunt.js file may help!

module.exports = function(grunt) {
    grunt.initConfig({
    ....
    });

    grunt.registerTask('appengine-update', 'Upload to App Engine.', function() {
        var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;
        var PIPE = {stdio: 'inherit'};
        var done = this.async();

        spawn('appcfg.py', ['update', 'build/task-manager-angular'], PIPE).on('exit', function(status) {
            done(status === 0);
        });
   });
   grunt.registerTask('clean', 'Clean the whole build directory.', function() {
        require('child_process').exec('rm -rdf build', this.async());
   });

   grunt.registerTask('run', 'Run app server.', function() {
       var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;
       var PIPE = {stdio: 'inherit'};
       var done = this.async();
       spawn('dev_appserver.py', ['.'], PIPE).on('exit', function(status) {
          done(status === 0);
       });
    });
});

//....
//Other settings
//....

grunt.loadTasks('tasks');
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-coffeelint');
grunt.registerTask('build', 'coffee less concat');
grunt.registerTask('deploy', 'coffee less concat build appengine-update');
grunt.registerTask('default', 'coffee less');
};

Answer 2

Found this Google App Engine management plugin for Grunt