Is it possible in grunt to watch files and automatically reload a ASP.net MVC web application. Or does livereload only work with files served through grunt. I have come across grunt plugin 'grunt-iisexpress' but not really sure if I can use it, in conjunction with tasks to reload a ASP.net MVC webapp when a file has changed.
I do not have any index.html as a starting page in my web app but _ViewStart.cshtml which kicks off the whole application.
It is possible. I just got live-reloading in my ASP.NET app using grunt-contrib-watch (https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-watch). It only took a few minutes.
I used this article as a guide: http://www.aliirz.com/javascript/2013/12/25/Live-Reload-with-Grunt/.
Do this via a command prompt in the ASP.NET app's folder.
If you don't yet have a package.json file and want to save your dependencies in one:
npm init
Then add Grunt and grunt-contrib-watch to your project:
npm install --save-dev grunt grunt-contrib-watch
Next create a Gruntfile.js in that same folder. Here's mine:
'use strict';
module.exports = function (grunt) {
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-watch');
grunt.initConfig({
watch: {
views: {
files: [
'Views/**/*.cshtml',
'Scripts/**/*.js',
'Content/**/*.css',
'Content/images/**/*',
'bin/**/*.dll'
],
options: {
livereload: true,
}
}
}
});
}
Run your live-reload server alongside your ASP.NET app:
grunt watch
Finally, to enable it in your ASP.NET app, simply add the live-reload snippet to your Layouts and/or Views:
<script src="http://localhost:35729/livereload.js"></script>
I came across this generator for mvc : https://github.com/has606/generator-aspnetmvc Perhaps you could do something like the grunt file in the project :
livereload: {
options: {livereload: 32684},
files: [
'<%%= yeoman.app %>/Content/**/*.css',
'<%%= yeoman.app %>/Scripts/**/*',
'<%%= yeoman.app %>/Content/images/**/*',
'<%%= yeoman.app %>/Views/**/*.cshtml',
'<%%= yeoman.app %>/bin/**/*.dll'
]
}
So any changes to views or compilation, reloads the site
