Request: more friendly CLI UX

[kevinSuttle]

❯ grunt init
grunt-cli: The grunt command line interface. (v0.1.13)

Fatal error: Unable to find local grunt.

If you're seeing this message, either a Gruntfile wasn't found or grunt
hasn't been installed locally to your project. For more information about
installing and configuring grunt, please see the Getting Started guide:

http://gruntjs.com/getting-started

Shouldn't this just generate a Gruntfile for the user?
The same error is displayed with grunt help and grunt --help.

I understand that at some point, this functionality was removed from Grunt, but I cannot figure out why. The links are broken in the current docs.

It'd also be great if there was a CLI UI like Bower or Yeoman.

❯ bower help init

Usage:
    bower init [<options>]

Options:
    -h, --help              Show this help message
    Additionally all global options listed in 'bower help' are available

Description:
    Creates a bower.json file based on answers to questions.

❯ yo
[?] What would you like to do? (Use arrow keys)
❯ Run the Angular generator (0.7.1)
  Run the Bootstrap3-less generator (3.0.1)
  Run the Pure generator (0.2.0)
  Run the Static generator (0.0.8)
  Run the Webapp generator (0.4.7)
  Run the Zurb-foundation generator (0.3.5)
  Run the Karma generator (0.6.0)
(Move up and down to reveal more choices)

Even further,

❯ grunt-init
Running "init" task

A valid init template name must be specified.

Available templates

(No templates found)

Templates that exist in the /Users/kevinsuttle/.grunt-init directory may be run
with "grunt-init TEMPLATE". Templates that exist in another location may be run
with "grunt-init /path/to/TEMPLATE". A template is a directory that must
contain, at the very minimum, a template.js file.

For more information, see http://gruntjs.com/project-scaffolding

This is an opportunity to do work on the user's behalf, not give them a chore.

[vladikoff]

Thanks for creating this issue.
We need to brainstorm this in the future.
Here's some examples of how other tools handle it:

~/dev
$ rake
rake aborted!
No Rakefile found (looking for: rakefile, Rakefile, rakefile.rb, Rakefile.rb)

(See full trace by running task with --trace)

$ make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.

[kevinSuttle]

Yeah, those could be improved also. I don't use them much anymore, but the (anti-)patterns are the same.

[chromeo]

Nearly 4 years later this issue still exists. Luckily this is a very popular search topic on Stackoverflow. How about this message instead of/in addition to '...please see the Getting Started Guide'

Working with an existing grunt project? Try this:
Change to the project's root directory.
Install project dependencies with npm install.
Run Grunt with grunt.