How can I run grunt on AppHarbor through MSBuild? - msbuild

Question

I can build my solution with MSBuild. It runs grunt and generates a "dist" folder within the solution directory, and MSBuild then copy those files to $(OutDir).
Let's say my solution is called  MySolution.sln. I have next to it another file called after.MySolution.sln.targets which contains
<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?-->
<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<Target Name="Grunt" AfterTargets="Build">
<Exec Command="grunt build --no-color" WorkingDirectory="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)" />
<ItemGroup>
<DistFiles Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\dist\**\*.*" />
</ItemGroup>
<Copy SourceFiles="#(DistFiles)" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)\www\%(RecursiveDir)" />
</Target>
</Project>
When AppHarbor builds the solution, I receive this error
Grunt:
grunt build --no-color
'grunt' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
Which is understandable, if grunt-cli was not already made available by AppHarbor. How then can I run my grunt build on AppHarbor?
Note: Technically, to run grunt successfully, I need to run npm install and bower install, so kudos if the answer also covers grunt packages and bower packages!

Answer 1

In order to run my build, I had to use node directly rather than grunt-cli. My MSBuild now simply calls run-grunt.bat, which contains:
#echo off
echo Installing npm dependencies
call npm config set registry http://registry.npmjs.org/
call npm install
echo Running bower.commands.install()
call node -e "var b = require('bower'); b.commands.install()"
echo Running grunt.cli()
call node -e "var g = require('grunt'); g.cli.tasks = ['build']; g.cli.options.color = false; g.cli();"
It seems to work; the next issue is that node on the build servers is still at version 0.6.10, but that's another problem :)
Note that I add the registry because otherwise it didn't work (I'll have to check with AppHarbor), and since I use bower and probably other people will too, I included in my example how to run bower install.
Important: you'll need to include grunt (and bower if you use it) in your packages.json file!