Can GruntJS fetch external files? - css

Question

For example I have index.css that contains links to another css files:
#import "http://<some_url>/bootstrap.css";
#import "http://<some_url>/plugin.css";
#import "app.css";
It is possible to concatenate these files with Grunt JS?

Answer 1

Looking at the Grunt API, the file stuff appears to apply exclusively to local files.
http://gruntjs.com/api/grunt.file
Furthermore I haven't seen anything in the source code where it parses CSS files looking for imports.
To get them concatenated together:
I'd recommend that you download the files locally, put them in your usual css folder then use Grunt concat as normal.
I'd then write a small script using wget to download fresh copies of these dependencies before building with grunt.

Answer 2

I know it's been a while since this was asked, but I came across it while trying to do something similar. Here is one way to save a file from a url using a grunt task.
module.exports = function(grunt) {
'use strict';
var http = require('http');
grunt.initConfig({
watch: {
scripts: {
files: ['**/*.cfc'],
tasks:['saveURL']
}
},
open:{
error:{
path:'http://<server>/rest/error.html'
}
}
});
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-watch');
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-open');
grunt.registerTask('default', ['watch']);
grunt.registerTask('saveURL', 'Write stuff to a file', function() {
var done = this.async();
var reloadurl = 'http://<server>/rest/index.cfm?rl';
grunt.log.writeln('Loading URL:' + reloadurl + ' ...');
http.get(reloadurl, function(res) {
var pageData = "";
if(res.statusCode != '200'){
//if we don't have a successful response queue the open:error task
grunt.log.error('Error Reloading Application!: ' + res.statusCode);
grunt.task.run('open:error');
}
res.setEncoding('utf8');
//this saves all the file data to the pageData variable
res.on('data', function (chunk) {
pageData += chunk;
});
res.on('end', function(){
//This line writes the pageData variable to a file
grunt.file.write('error.html', pageData)
done();
});
}).on('error', function(e) {
console.log("Got error: " + e.message);
done(false);
});
});
};