John Papa

Using Gulp in a JavaScript Build Pipeline

John Papa -

When I can remove the friction between myself and the keyboard, it’s a beautiful thing! I have more time to write code and not worry about repetitive processes. This is a key reason I love having a solid build pipeline and automated tasks in JavaScript. And my tool of choice is Gulp.js.

Last year I published my Pluralsight course Angular Patterns: Clean Code and my Angular Style Guide, which go together. I had a lot of folks asking for more information on using Gulp, since these materials both gave a quick glimpse of it. So I decided to release a new course with Pluralsight titled “JavaScript Build Automation with Gulp.js”, due out the end of Jan 2015. Here is a glimpse of what’s coming:

  1. Requirements
  2. The Value of JavaScript Task Runners (Are You Working Too Hard?)
  3. The Gulp API
  4. Getting Started with Gulp
  5. Code Analysis and Separating Tasks from Config
  6. CSS / Less Tasks and Error Handling
  7. Build Task with Injection
  8. Serving a Dev Build
  9. Browser-Sync
  10. Images and Fonts and Cleaning
  11. Angular Template Caching
  12. Creating and Serving a Production Build
  13. Minification and Filters
  14. Angular Dependency Injections
  15. Static Asset Revisions and Version Bumping
  16. Testing in Terminal
  17. Testing in a Browser

I’m looking forward to sharing this release and hope y’all enjoy it!

In the meantime, I posted a quick primer on Gulp and the differences between Gulp and Grunt in my Gulp/Grunt presentation here.

In short, Gulp is based on streams and its based on “code over configuration’. Grunt reads files in and writes them out to disk and is based on ‘configuration over code’. I find Gulp more appealing because I can read and write it faster than Grunt and it’s configuration approach. Both are awesome, I use both, and it really is a team decision where you are choosing what works for your team best.