Magento 2 grunt exec does not actually create symlinks

Question

I am following:

http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/frontend-dev-guide/css-topics/css_debug.html#grunt_prereq

it says grunt exec:<theme> does:

Republishes symlinks to the source files to the pub/static/frontend/Vendor/default/<locale> directory.

But that does not seem to happen!

pub/static/frontend/Vendor/default/de_DE/css/source contains regular files where I would expect symlinks to app/design/frontend/Vendor/default

Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

edit I am just having this s ame problem again with Magento 2.1 - even if the patch of issue https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/1619 should already be contained in Magento 2.1

Answer 1

1. Remove Cache
2. Clean theme by the command: grunt clean
3. Run CMD command prompt with administrator privilege.
4. Run the command: grunt exec:yourthemename
5. Run the command: grunt less:yourthemename
6. Run the command: grunt watch

Edit Alex: Basically working and the right solution, but with the limitations of https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/6367

Answer 2

It looks like this is a known bug:

https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/1619

The is a patch at

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/godban/8cb178f9a84ed85f1eac/raw/08692fc973adb4d5fa1eb8e57702c4a7d236658a/deployer_and_import_fix.patch

Answer 3

I found how recreate symlinks: use next command: bin/magento dev:source-theme:deploy --theme="{THEME_NAME}" where {THEME_NAME} - is string, like Magento/blank

See docs here: http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/config-guide/cli/config-cli-subcommands-less-sass.html

Maybe you need to run grunt exec before that, I'm not sure.

But after that you can run grunt watch and it will work.