CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gruntjsworkflowphpstormwebstormnode-modules
Luis Múzquiz
Luis Múzquiz

Reputation: 471

Making Grunt (and other stuff) to work with NodeJS as external library on PhpStorm/WebStorm

Quick question. Like many of you do, all my projects are separated by folders, for example project1; project2 and so on.

Now on all of my projects I use Grunt (yes I plan to give a try to Gulp in the future, but Grunt is what I know how to use for now). So as you know having Grunt means that I have to have the node_modules folder inside each and every project.

Since I use PhpStorm (same as WebStorm but with PHP functionality) it occurred to me that I could just declare on PhpStorm NodeJS as an external library instead of repeating myself doing the usual npm install on every project folder.

I read the PhpStorm/WebStorm docs and saw some videos, and went through the PhpStorm preferences Language & Frameworks > JavaScript > Libraries and enabled node_modules as a Global Library

Now we need to take into account that THAT SPECIFIC node library (the one declared on WebStorm/PhpStorm) will not have the Grunt library inside (cause it wasn't installed through npm install).

So I copied the Grunt folders that I had within my usual node_modules folder, only to declare it also as a global library, but needles to say grunt its not working the error I get is "unable to find local grunt".

Also after this I just did npm install to generate the node_modules folder with the appropriate Grunt dependencies, and declared THAT folder as a Global library from within PhpStorm/WebStorm. Also Grunt did not work.

So what is the point of having the option of declaring the node_modules as a library if we're not going to be able to use the other "libraries" inside that folder. Or am I doing something wrong here?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 55

Answers (1)

lena
lena

Reputation: 93728

Setting up node_modules as a global library in IDE (WebStorm, PHPStorm, etc) won't make these modules available from anywhere through require() calls in runtime. Libraries are only used by the IDE itself for completion/navigation (see https://blog.jetbrains.com/webstorm/2014/07/how-webstorm-works-completion-for-javascript-libraries/). You still need to install Grunt locally in each project to make Grunt work. You can also try using symlinks (see https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-cli/issues/10, Fatal error: Unable to find local grunt)

Upvotes: 1

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