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Default tasks

Overview

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The asset pipeline bundled in Sails is a set of Grunt tasks configured with conventional defaults designed to make your project more consistent and productive. The entire frontend asset workflow is completely customizable, while providing some default tasks out of the box. Sails makes it easy to configure new tasks to fit your needs.

Here are a few things that the default Grunt configuration in Sails does to help you out:

Default Grunt tasks

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Below is a list of the Grunt tasks that are included by default in new Sails projects:

clean
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This grunt task is configured to clean out the contents in the .tmp/public/ of your Sails project.

usage docs

hash
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Creates and adds an unique hash to the end of a filename for cache busting.

usage docs

concat
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Concatenates JavaScript and CSS files, and saves concatenated files in .tmp/public/concat/ directory.

usage docs

copy
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dev task config

Copies all directories and files, except coffeescript and less files, from the sails assets folder into the .tmp/public/ directory.

build task config

Copies all directories and files from the .tmp/public directory into a www directory.

usage docs

cssmin
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Minifies CSS files and places them into .tmp/public/min/ directory.

usage docs

less
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Compiles LESS files into CSS. Only the assets/styles/importer.less is compiled. This allows you to control the ordering yourself (i.e. import your dependencies, mixins, variables, resets, etc. before other stylesheets).

usage docs

sails-linker
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Automatically inject <script> tags for JavaScript files and <link> tags for CSS files. Also automatically links an output file containing precompiled templates using a <script> tag. A much more detailed description of this task can be found here, but the big takeaway is that script and stylesheet injection is only done in files containing <!--SCRIPTS--><!--SCRIPTS END--> and/or <!--STYLES--><!--STYLES END--> tags. These are included in the default views/layouts/layout.ejs file in a new Sails project. If you don't want to use the linker for your project, you can simply remove those tags.

usage docs

sync
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A grunt task to keep directories in sync. It is very similar to grunt-contrib-copy but tries to copy only those files that have actually changed. It specifically synchronizes files from the assets/ folder to .tmp/public/, overwriting anything that's already there.

usage docs

babel
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This grunt task is configured to transpile any >=ES6 syntax in your front-end Javascript files into code compatible with older browsers.

usage docs

uglify
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Minifies client-side JavaScript assets. Note that by default, this task will "mangle" all of your function and variable names (either by changing them to a much shorter name, or stripping them entirely). This is usually desirable as it makes your code significantly smaller, but in some cases can lead to unexpected results (particularly when you expect an object's constructor to have a certain name). To turn off or modify this behavior, use the mangle option when setting up this task.

usage docs

watch
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Runs predefined tasks whenever watched file patterns are added, changed, or deleted. Watches for changes on files in the assets/ folder, and re-runs the appropriate tasks (e.g. LESS compilation). This allows you to see changes to your assets reflected in your app without having to restart the Sails server.

usage docs

Is something missing?

If you notice something we've missed or could be improved on, please follow this link and submit a pull request to the sails repo. Once we merge it, the changes will be reflected on the website the next time it is deployed.

Concepts