grunt-sync with grunt-contrib-watch - gruntjs

Question

I am currently trying to configure grunt-sync to run inside a watch and am running into issues. I've reported the issue to the module's github page but decided to post here to draw upon the general development population rather than wait for a single contributor to come across my issue report.
So, I'm thinking this may just be a gap in my understanding of how to drive grunt tasks through a watch. I've got watches up and running for several tasks already and I'm adding grunt-sync to my workflow to automate publication of my changes to a network directory that blah blah blah...not important; my watch is working for some stuff but not for this. I'm dropping in the relevant config section along with my "concurrent","karma", and "sass" tasks to give you the gist of my overall grunt config.
module.exports = function(grunt){
grunt.initConfig({
pkg: grunt.file.readJSON("package.json"),
project: {
app: 'app',
},
sync:{
main: {
files:
[
{
cwd: 'app/',
src: [
'**/*.js',
'**/*.html',
'**/*.css',
'!app/node_modules/**'
],
dest: ['publish/']
}
],
verbose: true
}
},
karma: {
unit: {
configFile: 'test/karma.conf.js'
},
continuous:{
configFile: 'test/karma.conf.js',
singleRun: true,
browsers: ['PhantomJS']
}
},
sass:{
dev: {
options:{
style: 'expanded',
compass: false
},
files:{
'app/css/app.css':'app/css/app.scss'
}
},
dist: {
options: {
style: 'compressed',
compass: false
},
files:{
'app/css/app.css':'app/css/app.scss'
}
}
},
watch: {
sass: {
files: 'app/css/**/{,*/}*.{scss,sass}',
tasks: ['sass:dev']
},
styles: {
files: ['app/css/app.css'],
tasks: ['autoprefixer']
},
// karma: {
// files: ['test/*.js',
// 'test/**/*.js'
// ],
// tasks: ['karma:unit:run']
// },
livereload:{
options: {livereload: true},
files: ['app/**/*'],
},
sync:{
files: ['app/**'],
tasks: ['sync:main']
}
},
concurrent:
{
target: {
tasks: [
'karma:unit',
'watch'
],
options: {
logConcurrentOutput: true
}
}
}
});
require('matchdep').filterDev('grunt-*').forEach(grunt.loadNpmTasks);
grunt.registerTask('default', [
'sass:dev',
'concurrent:target'
]
);
};
Currently receiving the following warning when I grunt
Warning: Task "sync:main" not found. Use --force to continue.
Aborted due to warnings.
Since there is only the main subtask, I thought that maybe changing the watch from executing ['sync:main'] to executing ['sync'] would possibly work. The warning goes away but poof nothing happens...so I'm not sure if the issue is with my config or with the module implementation.
Any ideas?
Edit to Add:
From the module's github site, I see the following in sync.json
{
"main": {
"files": [{
"src": ["**"],
"dest": "bin/to",
"cwd": "bin/from"
}]
}
}
so that would lead me to believe that "main" is the name I should be using for the sync subtask. I'm really confused as to why grunt isn't recognizing it in my config, but I am not too terribly familiar with dissecting the code for grunt modules.

Answer 1

Well...turns out I referenced a module in my gruntfile before I ran npm install on it and then decided to come on the internet to tell everybody about it.
Edit:
To partially exonerate myself, I found the console that I used to run npm install grunt-sync --save-dev. I had run it, but I was in the
wrong directory; it added it to the wrong gruntfile.
To answer my own question, the gruntfile packaged with the [grunt-sync] module contains a watch section, so you just have to have grunt-contrib-watch installed; you don't have to do anything special. And that makes sense. A folder synchronization task would be pretty darned worthless without a file system watch, so it is perfectly reasonable to run the task in a very broad watch but with an inherent blacklist (it watches all files in all folders but only operates on files matching a src pattern.
So to get it to syn-down all files on all file changes,
sync: {
main:{
files:[{
src:[
'**'
]
, dest: 'publish'
}
]
,verbose: true
}
},
will copy all files to the publish subdirectory. I run mine inside a concurrent task
concurrent:
{
target: {
tasks: [
'karma:unit',
'sync:main',
'watch'
],
options: {
logConcurrentOutput: true
}
}
}
Personally, I'll probably be swapping this out with grunt-rsync because grunt-sync simply performs the file copy task inside [sync:main] What I want it to do is to only send deltas to the publish folder every time I save a file; that's a task for rsync.