Speed up build time of Hybris version 6.x

1. Overview

You may have noticed that the build time of Hybris version 6.x using ant all command becomes a little bit slower than the previous versions of Hybris.

In Hybris 6.x, Grunt take a very big part of the build time to compile smartEdit extensions (js, sass…).

[echo] building extension 'cmssmartedit'...
...
Running grunt packageSkipTests
[exec] ←[4mRunning "jshint:all" (jshint) task←[24m
[exec] ←[32m>> ←[39m437 files lint free.
...

I think that Grunt takes from 40% to 50% of the total building time.

So in this article, I will show you how to speed up the build time of Hybris by preventing Grunt from being executed.

2. Config

I didn’t find a legitimate way to prevent Grunt from being executed in Hybris yet.

You may exclude smartEdit extensions from localextensions.xml for example, but personally I prefer to keep it.

So the proposition bellow is just a hack! 🙂

So inside \hybris\bin\ext-content\npmancillary\resources\ant\windows.properties I change the value of loc.NPM_HOME to any arbitrary value, for example :

#loc.NPM_HOME=${ext.npmancillary.path}\\resources\\npm
loc.NPM_HOME=NOT SET
...

The loc.NPM_HOME is used inside \hybris\bin\ext-content\npmancillary\buildcallbacks.xml.

Before disabling Grunt :

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 minutes 47 seconds

After disabling Grunt :

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 minute 12 seconds

Note that you don’t want to disable Grunt permanently !

Mouad EL Fakir

Solution Architect with 10+ years of experience across full-stack development, DevOps, and enterprise software design. Expert in building scalable architectures, CI/CD pipelines, and internal developer platforms using tools like GitHub Actions, Terraform, Kubernetes (AKS), Azure, and Prometheus. Strong hands-on background in Java, Spring, Node.js, and event-driven systems (Kafka, Mulesoft). Passionate about developer experience, software quality, and platform engineering