Gradle Plugin for Node

This plugin enables you to run any NodeJS script as part of your build. It does not depend on NodeJS (or NPM) being installed on your system. The plugin will download and manage NodeJS distributions, unpack them into your local .gradle directory and use them from there.

Installing the Plugin

Releases of this plugin are hosted at Bintray and is part of the jCenter repository. Development builds are published for every commit to the master branch. These SNAPSHOTs are hosted on the OJO repository and to use them you will need to add OJO to your buildscript configuration.

Setup the plugin like this:

plugins {
  id "com.moowork.node" version "0.12"
}

Or:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        maven {
            url "https://plugins.gradle.org/m2/"
        }
    }

    dependencies {
        classpath "com.moowork.gradle:gradle-node-plugin:0.12"
    }
}

apply plugin: 'com.moowork.node'

Running a NodeJS Script

To use this plugin you have to define some tasks in your build.gradle file. If you have a NodeJS script in src/scripts/my.js, then you can execute this by defining the following Gradle task:

task myScript(type: NodeTask) {
  script = file('src/scripts/my.js')
}

You can also add arguments, like this:

task myScript(type: NodeTask) {
  script = file('src/scripts/my.js')
  args = ['arg1', 'arg2']
}

NodeTask is a wrapper around the core Exec task. You can set the ignoreExitValue property on it:

task myScript(type: NodeTask) {
  script = file('src/scripts/my.js')
  ignoreExitValue = true
}

You can also customize all other values on the ExecSpec by passing a closure to execOverrides. It's executed last, possibly overriding already set parameters.

task myScript(type: NodeTask) {
  script = file('src/scripts/my.js')
  execOverrides {
    it.ignoreExitValue = true
    it.workingDir = 'somewhere'
    it.standardOutput = new FileOutputStream('logs/my.log')
  }
}

When executing this for the first time, it will run a nodeSetup task that downloades NodeJS (for your platform) and NPM (Node Package Manager) if on windows (other platforms include it into the distribution).

Executing npm Tasks

When adding the node plugin, you will have a npmInstall task already added. This task will execute npm install and installs all dependencies in package.json. It will only run when changes are made to package.json or node_modules. Execute it like this:

$ gradle npmInstall

All npm command can also be invoked using underscore notation based on a gradle rule:

$ gradle npm_install
$ gradle npm_update
$ gradle npm_list
$ gradle npm_cache_clean
...

These however are not shown when running gradle tasks, as they generated dynamically. However they can be used for dependency declarations, such as:

npm_install.dependsOn(npm_cache_clean)

More arguments can be passed via the build.gradle file:

npm_update {
  args = ['--production', '--loglevel', 'warn']
}

If you want to extend the tasks more or create custom variants, you can extend the class NpmTask:

task installExpress(type: NpmTask) {
  // install the express package only
  args = ['install', 'express', '--save-dev']
}

Configuring the Plugin

You can configure the plugin using the "node" extension block, like this:

node {
  // Version of node to use.
  version = '0.11.10'

  // Version of npm to use.
  npmVersion = '2.1.5'

  // Base URL for fetching node distributions (change if you have a mirror).
  distBaseUrl = 'https://nodejs.org/dist'

  // If true, it will download node using above parameters.
  // If false, it will try to use globally installed node.
  download = true

  // Set the work directory for unpacking node
  workDir = file("${project.buildDir}/nodejs")

  // Set the work directory where node_modules should be located
  nodeModulesDir = file("${project.projectDir}")
}

Note that download flag is default to false. This will change in future versions.

Using a Custom (project-local) Version of npm

The plugin will use a locally-installed npm if it exists, regardless of the method of installation.

If you would like the plugin to install use a custom version of npm rather than the one bundled with the version of node installation, you can set npmVersion in the node extension block. The plugin will install the npm to the project's node_modules directory by configuring the npmSetup task.

Building the Plugin

To build the plugin, just type the following command:

./gradlew clean build