Creating a Grunt plugin on Windows in MINGW

I’ve been working with grunt a bit lately, and have found the need for a task that there doesn’t seem to be in the expansive list of existing plugins. So I thought I’d create my own. Fortunately, grunt has a great and simple page on doing this (http://gruntjs.com/creating-plugins).

Unfortunately, I ran into some issues.

I usually like to work in the Git Bash shell that comes with MINGW. Trouble is, this was causing some pathing issues. Specifically, with these two commands:

1. Install the gruntplugin template with git clone git://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-init-gruntplugin.git ~/.grunt-init/gruntplugin(%USERPROFILE%\.grunt-init\gruntplugin on Windows).
2. Run grunt-init gruntplugin in an empty directory.

Apparently MINGW, or at least my version, has some issues resolving %USERPROFILE%. So I ended up with a cloned git repo in my local directory called %USERPROFILE%.grunt-initgruntplugin. After fixing that and moving it to my root user profile I kept geting an “EINVAL” issue on the next command. I figured this had to be a pathing issue too. So I dropped out of MINGW into a cmd shell by typing cmd. Except that didn’t quite do it. Maybe MINGW was intercepting input and filtering it in an unexpected way, but my problems became even worse. So my fix?:

1. Add git to your OS Path variable (C:\Program Files\Git\bin)
2. Run a regular command shell (cmd outside of MINGW)

With those two small changes, everything worked flawlessly.