Starting a Django virtual environment in Grunt - django

Question

Coming from a JS / Node development background, I like to use Grunt for a lot of my automation. For a recent project I picked up some baby Django, to get a feel for how it operated, but still wanted to integrate Grunt for some of my workflow.
I am currently starting my Django server via Grunt, using the spawn-shell module. This works just fine, but I am also using a virtualenv setup, and would as well like to start that up via Grunt.
The command I am using to start the virtual enviornment is:
source ./venv/bin/activate
Which works just fine from the terminal command line as is. However, executing this command from either grunt shell or grunt exec does nothing. I get no errors from Grunt (it says running, then done without errors), but nothing gets started.
The grunt exec command is as follows:
exec: {
start: {
cmd: function() {
return "source ./venv/bin/activate";
}
}
}
And the shell command is:
shell: {
start: {
command: 'source ./venv/bin/activate',
options: {
stdout: true
}
}
}
Any ideas on how to get this working? Or is it not possible, and I should just resort to entering the command manually at start?

Answer 1

Normally when trying to get other tooling to launch django while using a virtualenv the normal thing is to perform both of the following in one command :
activate the virtualenv
run the command you want.
so this ends up being :
. ${VIRTUALENVHOME}/bin/activate && ${PROJECTROOT}/manage.py runserver 0:8000
This is pretty much how it's done with Fabric, Ansible and any other automation tool.
edit: of course you'd be supplying the values for the variables VIRTUALENVHOME and PROJECTROOT