grunt-available-tasks

Want all of your registered tasks in a nice, alphabetized, colour coded list? Think the task list outputted by grunt --help could be more descriptive? grunt-available-tasks to the rescue!

Install

Install via npm:

npm install grunt-available-tasks --save-dev

Enable it inside your Gruntfile.js with this:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-available-tasks');

Alternatively, use a plugin such as https://github.com/sindresorhus/load-grunt-tasks:

require('load-grunt-tasks')(grunt);

The "availabletasks" task

Once installed, you will need to specify a section in your Gruntfile, like so:

grunt.initConfig({
    availabletasks: {
        tasks: {}
    }
})

If you want some further customisation, the options are as follows:

Options

options.tasks

Type: Object Default value: false

The list of tasks to either include or exclude with the filter option.

options.filter

Type: String Default value: false

Define either 'include', or 'exclude'. The filter configuration will override the group, description and sort configurations; so if you have filtered out a task it will not show up in any groups, it won't receive a custom description and it won't appear at the top of your task list. An example configuration:

availabletasks: {
    tasks: {
        options: {
            filter: 'include',
            tasks: ['availabletasks', 'default']
        }
    }
}

options.groups

Type: Object Default value: {} (empty)

You may choose to group similar tasks if you'd like; note that the same task can appear in multiple groups if you wish. An example configuration:

availabletasks: {
    tasks: {
        options: {
            groups: {
                'Run code validation tasks': ['lintspaces', 'jshint', 'jscs']
            }
        }
    }
}

options.descriptions

Type: Object Default value: {} (empty)

Override any task name, including aliases, with any description that you like. An example configuration:

availabletasks: {
    tasks: {
        options: {
            descriptions: {
                'availabletasks' : 'A really nice task list helper for your Grunt enabled projects.'
            }
        }
    }
}

options.sort

Type: Boolean|Object Default value: true

Setting this to false will maintain the original sort order for the tasks. true will sort alphabetically, and specifying an object will allow you to do your own custom sorting. An example configuration:

availabletasks: {
    tasks: {
        options: {
            sort: ['lintspaces', 'availabletasks']
        }
    }
}

options.reporter

Type: String|Function Default value: default

There are three available reporters:

• Default (default) : Reports all tasks defined in the project and any plugins
• Project (project) : Report only user defined tasks in the default format
• Markdown (markdown) : Report all tasks defined in the project and any plugins in markdown format

Alternately, you can pass a function to this option if you'd like to specify a custom reporter. A simple reporter could look like this:

availabletasks: {
    tasks: {
        options: {
            reporter: function(options) {
                grunt.log.writeln(options.currentTask.name);
            }
        }
    }
}

In this function you are expected to handle group headings and how you'd like the multi task targets to be displayed. The options object that is passed will look something like this:

{
    currentTask: {
        name: 'availabletasks',
        type: '=>',
        info: 'List available Grunt tasks & targets.',
        group: 'Ungrouped'
    },
    meta: {
        taskCount: 2,
        groupCount: 0,
        header: 'Ungrouped', // Only passed when the group has changed
        longest: 14 // The length of the longest task, useful for column padding.
    }
}

Output

From left to right, this plugin outputs the task name, the type of the task, then the description and finally a list of multitask targets should you have configured two or more. The type of the task is registered with arrows:

• > denotes a single target task.
• -> denotes a multi target task.
• => denotes a user defined task.