Any idea why 'grunt spritesheet' would not not complete stylesheet generation when being run by a third party deploy tool like Chef

[duro]

I know this is a long shot, but I'm wondering if you might be able to provide me any insight into why when I run grunt spritesheet as part of a third party deploy action in Chef, the grunt task fires up just fine, but only gets as far as spritesheet generation, and does not continue on to stylesheet generation.

I do not get a failure, it just as if grunt moves on to the next task at that stage. When I run this direct on the machine, it works just fine. It is only when the process is being started by the third party deployer.

One idea I had was that possibly something in the script was sending a message to STDOUT that made the spawning process thing that the child process was done. But that is just a guess. I haven't been able to fully deduce, but I'm just looking for help in demystifying this.

[richardbutler]

@duro Sorry about the delay, been far too busy to maintain this project recently. Did you find a way around this issue, or a fix? Sounds like an environmental thing to me – paths that Chef can't resolve, maybe?

[mattcasey]

There's a bug in node-spritesheet, that if your output path doesn't exist and begins with ".", then q-fs won't create the directory, in fact it just fails silently, and if you're running Grunt it will stop the other scripts. This but was fixed in q-io, however: kriskowal/q-io#53

(Note: I don't have the './' as part of the path in my Gruntfile, but I believe it gets added somewhere in node-spritesheet)

A temp solution is to make the directory first with https://www.npmjs.org/package/grunt-mkdir

[jfroom]

I've been trying to troubleshoot why node-spritesheet keeps killing the grunt task queue. @mattcasey — your note about not having './' in front of the path resolved that for me. Thanks.