process

Check dependencies in grunt by default

Quickly verify that necessary top level dependencies are installed.

I noticed that in my normal dev workflow, I often (sometimes) run into the following problem:

  1. pull changes from github
  2. run build tool, for example grunt
  3. get cryptic errors
  4. blame someone for breaking the build
  5. find out that someone just added a dependency / updated a version (that's a tricky one to find)
  6. run npm install and everything works after that

This lead to me thinking: can grunt check if I have the correct dependencies installed automatically as part of the build?

I looked around and found a few plugins that do this, for example grunt-check-modules. Unfortunately, they all seem to be wrappers around npm ls command. The problem with that command is that it checks the entire dependency tree = slow. On a typical project it takes 5-10 seconds, which adds significantly to the build time. I want to check the dependencies very quickly as part of the default task.

The key shortcut is that we only need to really worry about two cases:

  1. new dependencies have been added to the package.json and missing from the local node_modules folder.
  2. an existing dependency has been bumped to newer version and needs to be reinstalled.

So I wrote deps-ok and a grunt plugin grunt-deps-ok to check missing folders and version compatibility for npm modules. As long as installed version is greater or equal to declared, it is ok. If a check fails, it just suggests to run npm install.

version numbers

I used semver to compare package version numbers. This works great as long as you have valid versions for your dependencies 1.2.0, 2.8.0, etc. Please do not use * or latest, this is a bad practice in general and would not work with deps-ok.

The same approach might be easy to extend to bower dependencies, feel free to try and let me know.