Creating plugins

Install grunt-init with npm install -g grunt-init
Install the gruntplugin template with git clone git://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-init-gruntplugin.git ~/.grunt-init/gruntplugin (%USERPROFILE%\.grunt-init\gruntplugin on Windows).
Run grunt-init gruntplugin in an empty directory.
Run npm install to prepare the development environment.
Author your plugin.
Run npm publish to publish the Grunt plugin to npm!

Notes

Naming your task

The "grunt-contrib" namespace is reserved for tasks maintained by the Grunt team, please name your task something appropriate that avoids that naming scheme.

Grunt hides error stack traces by default, but they can be enabled for easier task debugging with the --stack option. If you want Grunt to always log stack traces on errors, create an alias in your shell. Eg, in bash, you could do alias grunt='grunt --stack'.

Storing task files

Only store data files in a .grunt/[npm-module-name]/ directory at the project's root and clean up after yourself when appropriate. This is not a solution for temporary scratch files, use one of the common npm modules (eg temporary, tmp) that take advantage of the OS level temporary directories for that case.

Avoid Changing the Current Working Directory: `process.cwd()`

By default, the current working directory is set to be the directory that contains the gruntfile. The user can change it using grunt.file.setBase() in their gruntfile, but plugins should take care to not change it.

path.resolve('foo') can be used to get the absolute path of the filepath 'foo' relative to the Gruntfile.

Creating your task

You might also want to know how to create your own tasks or take a look at the API reference.

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