How to use grunt-contrib-copy to copy to root AND change directory structure

Question

I have an express app with my dev views in /assets/views. I figure I need to separate development and production views because in production I'll be editing the HTML when I used grunt-contrib-usemin to concat/uglify scripts.

So here's the problem. My current tree:

assets/views
├── 404.html
├── index.html
├── layout.html
├── question_ask.html
└── question_display.html

Ideally, I want my production-ready views to live on the same level as assets. Using grunt-contrib-copy, it seems to copy the whole tree. I currently am putting it into public since I'm not sure how to set my dest to the root of the project.

copy: {
    views: {
        src: ['assets/views/*.html'],
        dest: 'public/'
    }

So there are a few questions here:

1. Is it bad practice to have dev views and production views? If so, is there another way of producing a view that has references to concat/uglified scripts?

2. How the heck can I use grunt-contrib-copy to copy to the root of my project? I don't want assets/views obviously, I just want a views/* folder that has the contents of what's in assets/views/*.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to specify the flatten option which will remove the directory structure from the destination path. See my answer here: Copy all files from directory to another with Grunt.js copy