This prototype enables grunt to hook into plays lifecycle.
The layout is such everything under the app dir is play related and everything under the ui dir is grunt related.
By using grunt, bower, yeoman for the frontend build and sbt for the backend we have the perfect mix.
play
from play you can now run bower, npm, yo, grunt
so to get started run these straight from the sbt console
npm install
bower install
Then when you start the app with the usual play run
it will run together with play until you hit ctrl + c
The magic thing with this is that bootstrap gets fetched by bower, and we reference it in our main.less file. Angular, jQuery... also get fetched via bower and referenced in the uglify task of grunt.
grunt then outputs everything to the standard play public folder which we can then get the stuff from the usual way.
@routes.Assets.at("javascripts/main.min.js")
- Angular doesn't seem to work well with livereload, so you still have to do a reload when changing your $scope (but less works great!)
We could use this technique to output a json file with the git version in http://eng.42go.com/play-framework-apps-be-version-aware/ and then use the grunt api to load the version and append it to the outputted javascripts. and then use plays getFile api to load the same version file and append it to both the less and javascript files.
This seems a bit overkill, but if we wan't to deliver the files via nginx we would wan't to include the public folder in the dist zip instead of using the files stored in the .jar file.
I'm going to see if it's possible to make this into a plugin or together with these guys https://github.com/guardian/sbt-grunt-plugin and make the scaffolding for angular into a giter8 repo.
Let me know if you have any suggestions or contributions!