GruntJS and Maximum Call Stack Size Exceeded Warning

I am trying to set up a GruntJS build pipeline for one my side projects and ran into a very interesting warning today, shown below.

What was weird was that this warning or error only started when I added my task to compile my Typescript code.  If I called the default task, which did not compile the Typescript code, everything worked as expected.  Of course, because the Typescript task was failing, I assumed the error had something to do with its configuration.  However, as you can see, my Typescript setup is pretty simple:

Because my setup looked right I thought it would be a smart idea to run the task with the verbose output via the grunt typescript –v command.  The second I ran this I saw the issue …

The Running “typescript” task goes on and on until we hit our stack overflow.

I immediately changed focus from my Typescript configuration to my task configuration and saw the issue.

Looking at my task setup above I saw the issue.  It is a bad idea to name your Grunt task the same as one of the target tasks in your config … D'OH.

After changing the name of my Grunt tasks as follows, the world was a happy place.

The moral of the story is two-fold:

1. Do NOT name your Grunt task the same as your configuration element.
2. Use the –v option to see what is really going on when a Grunt task fails.

Until next time.

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