Grunt-flowbin NPM

grunt-flowbin

This is a thin grunt wrapper around the flow-bin command line tool.

It allows you to integrate Flow's static JavaScript analysis into your Grunt toolchain. Unlike other solutions, this one attempts to pass off as much work to flow-bin as possible and get out of your way.

Installation

npm install --save-dev grunt-flowbin

Configuration

Add a target to your grunt configuration for each flow command you'd like to run. If you wanted to run flow check as grunt flowbin:check you'd add this:

grunt.initConfig({
  flowbin: {
    check: {},
  },
});

flow options

If you're too solarized and need to run flow check --color=never as grunt flowbin:check then you can add target options for it like:

grunt.initConfig({
  flowbin: {
    check: {
      color: 'never',
    },
  },
});

If you want to pass a flag (an option without a value) like flow check --quiet, give the option a value of null:

grunt.initConfig({
  flowbin: {
    check: {
      quiet: null,
    },
  },
});

If you want to see the way flow check is invoked (the default options, etc), run grunt --verbose ....

Supported flow commands

Here are the Grunt targets you can define for all the flow commands currently supported. If you define a target that's not supported, the Grunt task will attempt to run it just like flow yourtarget but that may or may not work.

grunt.initConfig({
  flowbin: {
    check: {},
    start: {},
    stop: {},
    status: {},
  },
});

Run flow --help for info on what these commands do.

Continuous flow checks

Since grunt flowbin:check checks all files (which can be slow), you will probably want to use grunt-contrib-watch to only check files as they change in your source tree. flow-bin provides support for this with a standalone server that caches a bunch of things.

Here's an example of how to start a server, watch for file changes, and check files as they change:

grunt.initConfig({
  // Configure your `grunt flowbin` task:
  flowbin: {
    // Define targets for the flow commands you need.
    start: {},
    status: {},
  },
  // Configure your `grunt watch:develop` task:
  watch: {
    develop: {
      files: [
        // Watch all your source files. Your path may be different.
        'src/**/*.js',
      ],
      tasks: [
        // Run your custom test command (assuming it exists as such):
        'test',
        // Ask the flow server for status on recently changed files:
        'flowbin:status',
      ],
    },
  },
});

// Register a custom command that starts a flow server then watches
// for file changes:
grunt.registerTask('develop', [
  'flowbin:start',
  'watch:develop',
]);

With this configuration, you can start a custom task as grunt develop that calls flowbin:start to start the server then watch:develop to watch for file changes. When a file changes, this configuration calls your custom test command and then flowbin:status to only check the status on newer files.