grunt-msbuild

Build projects with MSBuild and XBuild using Grunt

Getting Started

This plugin targets Grunt ^1.3. While it may work on older versions it's generally good practice to always use an up to date version of Grunt!

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-msbuild --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-msbuild');

The "msbuild" task

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named msbuild to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
    msbuild: {
        dev: {
            src: ['ConsoleApplication5.csproj'],
            options: {
                projectConfiguration: 'Debug',
                targets: ['Clean', 'Rebuild'],
                maxCpuCount: 4,
                buildParameters: {
                    WarningLevel: 2
                },
                nodeReuse:true,
                customArgs:[ '/noautoresponse', '/detailedsummary'],
                verbosity: 'quiet',
                msbuildPath: 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2019\\Community\\MSBuild\\Current\\Bin\\amd64\\MSBuild.exe',
                inferMsbuildPath:false
            }
        }
    }
});

Options

For more information, see MSBuild Command-Line Reference.

MSBuild version selection

If inferMsbuildPath is set to true, grunt-msbuild will try to infer the msbuildpath using vswhere.exe. Otherwise, you should set msbuildPath option. msbuildPath is used to target your msbuild version.

Example values for msbuildPath:

C:\\Program Files (x86)\\MSBuild\\MSBuild\\<VERSION>\\Bin\\amd64\\MSBuild.exe

C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2017\\<YOUR_EDITION>\\MSBuild\\15.0\\Bin\\amd64\\MSBuild.exe

C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2019\\<YOUR_EDITION>\\MSBuild\\Current\\Bin\\amd64\\MSBuild.exe

msbuild  (This will work if msbuild is available on the path for example)

Contributing

All contributions welcome :) Add to the VS integration tests for any new or changed functionality if possible.

Issues and installing previous versions

If you have any problems with the latest release please log an issue at https://github.com/stevewillcock/grunt-msbuild/issues.

If you need to roll back to an earlier version you can use the following syntax to install a specific version

npm install grunt-msbuild@0.1.12

Also see https://www.npmjs.org/doc/json.html#dependencies for details of how to specify a particular package version in your package.json file

Release Notes