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Beyond “Hello, World” with Gulp

By Lyza Gardner

Published on May 23rd, 2014

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(This post is for: web developers who have used, or thought about using, a build tool before, are JS-comfy and maybe have noodled around in node.js but wouldn’t, say, feel up to submitting a talk to a node conference.)

It would be hackneyed to call the last twelve months the “Year of Build and Workflow” for web developers, but there’s an element of reality to the contrivance. In 2013, there was grunt (heck, there still is; it didn’t die or anything) and a whole lot of blog posts about streamlining workflow around SASS and templating and build package management, etc.: topics that were—poof!—suddenly an imperative for general people working on the web. I wrote a thing about workflow for A List Apart earlier this year, a few weary weeks after the whole “Oh, you learned grunt? Sucker! Now you need to learn gulp, because whatever!” revolution happened.

Summarized as this: a whole lot of people (increasingly non-nerdcore) learned to use grunt to wrangle previously-tedious workflow tasks for building web sites. This represented a big jump in things we all needed to know. And then, kind of literally overnight, there was gulp. For me, this felt like a burden as well as an opportunity.

I wasn’t exactly a holdout (as you can see), but I was initially resistant to throw the grunt baby out with the 2013 bathwater simply because a new tool existed. And, like maybe some of you (?), I found the initial sell a bit baffling: “streaming build system?” I didn’t know I wanted that? Awesome syntax? I didn’t really have a gripe with grunt on that front. “Speed?” Maybe? I didn’t exactly have to go brew a cup of coffee while my grunt tasks ran.

But smart people I know kept extolling its highlights and I decided to give it a whirl. The familiar stages of dev-new-tool excitement-grief happened:

  1. Find and install new tool that people crow about.
  2. Get satisfying example configuration/program running using new tool.
  3. Extend satisfying example configuration/program in a tiny way and find success in making it do something useless, but cool. HELLS YEAH.
  4. Extend awesome slightly-extended configuration/program in another way to make it do something you actually need it to do. Spend 3 hours/days progressively assuring yourself you are a moron—this should really be so easy! Two possible outcomes: rage quit or eventual, sweat-soaked breakthrough.
  5. Assuming you’ve made it this far, progress with a slight wariness, possibly even progressively assuring yourself that the tool devs or Stack Overflow or Google or a particular plugin or, hell, the entire language you’re working in is the real moron here. Also revel in the fact that extant examples of what you’ve now managed to do exist on the Internet at all—you’ve birthed something truly novel. This is often a necessary step to repair the psyche.
  6. If you are kind, you then help other people avoid step 4 (or, at least, put a reassuring hand on their shoulder).

Here’s some of why you might want to use gulp instead of another alternative:

  • Pretty syntax and intuitive structure: There is nothing wrong with grunt’s syntax, but gulp’s is kinda pretty. Using Streams means you’ll be able to do a lot of chaining, which always feels pleasing to the code-scanning eye. I was never a huge fan of the double-step grunt convention of grunt.loadNpmTasks() and grunt.registerTask(). In gulp you can require() and define gulp.task()—that feels more natural to me. I find I don’t have to look up core API stuff for gulp; with grunt, I never memorized it.
  • Speed: There’s no doubt. gulp feels noticeably fast. That is not exactly a scientific observation, but I stand by it.
  • Streams: If you know node already, gulp’s Streams architecture will make you feel right at home.
  • Gulp has a nice clarity that it is about working with streams of files. As such, there is more symmetry between any two given gulp tasks than most given grunt tasks. gulp.src globs and gulp.dest paths become second nature. Stream in, though, out.
  • Works with lots of things, easily: Like grunt, gulp has plugins (many of them). But the first edict in the guidelines for creating a gulp plugin is: “Your plugin should not do something that can be done easily with an existing node module,” meaning that gulp encourages the use of non-plugin-i-fied node packages wherever possible (versus “[w]rapping every possible thing just for the sake of wrapping it”). The plugin landscape feels correspondingly more serene.
  • Make sure your gulp tasks finish correctly. If not, it will wreak havoc with dependencies and other tasks. Be sure to read the section of the docs about valid things to return from gulp tasks and how to handle async tasks. Trust me on this one.
  • In fact, read the entire API documentation. If this sounds like a tall order, take note that it is shorter than this blog post. The core API for gulp is outstanding in its simplicity.
  • Get an understanding of Streams, a core node construct, because this is the way that gulp works. Take a few minutes/a while and read a primer on Streams. It’s a bit to get your head around, but if you’re doing any heavy lifting with gulp (or other node, for that matter), you’ll be glad you learned.
  • Watch out for plugin quality. The plugin landscape may be straightforward, but it’s young, and there are some stinkers. I lost some serious time to a couple.
  • Dig hard for real-world (read: complex) examples. This situation has gotten better in the past few months. Dan Tello’s excellent post on Gulp + Browserify: The Everything Post is a must-read-right-now. When I first encountered his repo full of organized gulp tasks, it changed my everything. I ended up extending my fork to handle dependencies effectively, but his gulp-starter repo has since been updated to do that, also, so, win! There is more documentation and examples out there now than there was a few months ago. But documentation about gulp things can sometimes presuppose that you know more about various concepts than—gasp—perhaps you do. Don’t fret. That jargon sounds weird to other people, too. Read slowly and give yourself some time!
  • Watch out for plugins getting between you and what you’re doing. Like any build tool with plugins, gulp puts a layer between you and (in gulp and grunt’s case) node. Sometimes it’s hard to debug whether you’re doing it wrong, or whether the plugin between you and the wrapped node package is doing something wrong (or at least making things real complicated). If you don’t understand the syntax of a plugin or what it’s doing, consider that a red flag and slow down until you do. Or: see if you can accomplish what you’re doing with a node module instead.
  • Complexity explodes as you add more tools to the mix. We are using browserify for our application code, but it got outrageously onerous for managing vendor code, much of which was not modular in any sensical way (this was serious step-four territory). We ended up throttling down and using something a bit simpler. Don’t be afraid to over-simplify if it gets the job done. I find you can usually kick up complexity later, when needed, but that the opposite—dialing it down—is not so easy.

We do some really cool things at present with gulp. We use it to parse YAML front-matter out of templates (which get piped through underscore and have partials inserted and come out as static HTML files) to create an auto-index of project assets, adding automated screenshots (thanks, phantom.js!) at different widths to show responsive layout. This of course along with SASS and auto-prefixer and browserify and concatenation and and and…whew. Because each task in the works is totally modular, this ends up not feeling rickety and spaghetti, believe it or not—and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Go out and build! Let me know how it goes!

My thanks to Cloud Fourian Erik Jung for leading us out of step 4 hell vis-a-vis the whole vendor JS thing I mentioned above.


Comments

Brent S. said:

Hi Lyza,

Great post! I had just learned Grunt when I stumbled on it. One thing that I can’t figure out how to do with Gulp is set a timestamp at the top of a file. The gulp-header plugin allows me to add something to the top of a file, but I’ve yet to discover anything in gulp that in analogous to … Do you know of anything?

Thanks!