Continue certain tasks in grunt even if one fails

Question

Is there a way to configure a sequence of tasks so that specific subsequent ones (I don't want --force on the whole batch) run even if one fails? For example, consider a case like this

1. Create some temporary files
2. Run some unit tests which involve those temporary files
3. Clean up those temporary files

I can do this:

grunt.registerTask('testTheTemp', ['makeTempFiles', 'qunit', 'removeTempFiles']);

But if qunit fails then the removeTempFiles task never runs.

Answer 1

Here's one workaround. It's not pretty, but it does solve the issue.

You create two extra tasks which you can wrap at the beginning/end of any sequence that you want to continue even over failure. The check for existing value of grunt.option('force') is so that you do not overwrite any --force passed from the command line.

grunt.registerTask('usetheforce_on',
 'force the force option on if needed', 
 function() {
  if ( !grunt.option( 'force' ) ) {
    grunt.config.set('usetheforce_set', true);
    grunt.option( 'force', true );
  }
});
grunt.registerTask('usetheforce_restore', 
  'turn force option off if we have previously set it', 
  function() {
  if ( grunt.config.get('usetheforce_set') ) {
    grunt.option( 'force', false );
  }
});
grunt.registerTask( 'myspecialsequence',  [
  'usetheforce_on', 
  'task_that_might_fail_and_we_do_not_care', 
  'another_task', 
  'usetheforce_restore', 
  'qunit', 
  'task_that_should_not_run_after_failed_unit_tests'
] );

I've also submitted a feature request for Grunt to support this natively.