Cannot get TeamCity Build Step to execute grunt-cli

Question

I'm trying to automate building of my project on a TeamCity server. I'm using grunt to define and configure my tasks. This works fine locally. Yet, I am having problems getting TeamCity (running on Windows Server 2008) to recognize grunt as a executable, the build will fail when grunt is called as it is not available.

I do have grunt-cli installed on the server and can execute it when I login via ssh (The build script also succeeds when I trigger it that way).

I'm running npm install before I call grunt and also tried to force install grunt-cli using a preinstall instruction in my package.json like:

{
  "name": "someName",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "private": true,
  "scripts" : {
    "preinstall" : "npm install grunt-cli -g"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "grunt": "~0.4.1",
    "grunt-contrib-jshint": "~0.6.3",
    "grunt-contrib-less": "~0.8.1",
    "grunt-contrib-watch": "~0.5.3",
    "grunt-contrib-requirejs": "~0.4.1",
    "grunt-strip": "~0.2.1",
    "grunt-bump": "0.0.11"
  } 
}

I can see npm installing grunt-cli, yet grunt is not available in the next step.

I also tried wrapping that into a bat file or using multiple build steps for dependency installing and running the grunt task.

Does anyone have any input on this?

possible duplicate of TeamCity build runner not recognizing executable — m90

deadlydog deadlydog · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-15T16:02:40

I had the same problem when trying to get our TFS Build agents to run grunt-cli. In the end I just changed my build process to use the full path to the grunt-cli executable.

So I changed from using this:

grunt deploy

to using this:

"C:\Users\tfsservice\AppData\Roaming\npm\grunt.cmd" deploy

I know this is just a workaround and not a true fix, but it should be good enough to get you going. I hope this helps.

-- Update --

I was able to get it to work properly by simply adding "C:\Users\tfsservice\AppData\Roaming\npm" (where the grunt.cmd file is found) to my system path, and then rebooting my build server. The reboot was required since tfsservice is both a user and a running service; simply restarting the service may be enough, but I didn't test that.

After doing this grunt deploy worked in our builds as expected.

Cannot get TeamCity Build Step to execute grunt-cli

2 Answers