Book Image

Getting Started with Gulp ??? Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Travis Maynard
Book Image

Getting Started with Gulp ??? Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Travis Maynard

Overview of this book

This book is a hands-on guide to get you up to speed with gulp. You will quickly learn how to install, configure, and run your own build system. It will instill you with the ability to automate several common development tasks to vastly improve your development workflow. This book first demonstrates various Gulp use cases before running through the steps of configuring, running, and customizing Gulp, providing you with core concepts of gulp, node.js, and npm. Diving a bit deeper into the gulp ecosystem, we will discuss when and why to use a node module instead of a gulp plugin. We will also go over a few issues that we can run into while using gulp and learn about ways to work around them to improve your gulp experience. By the end of this book, you will be able to create your very own gulp build from scratch, create and maintain tasks and project builds, and automate your workflow with plugins and custom tasks.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Introducing Gulp
2
Getting Started
3
Understanding the Basics of Gulp
4
Performing Tasks with Gulp
5
Creating Advanced Tasks
6
Tips, Tricks, and Resolving Issues

Performing Tasks with Gulp

We have spent a lot of time preparing you for this moment. It is finally time to write some code. For this simple project, we will use a very basic Hello, world! style examples to demonstrate how Gulp accesses, modifies, and outputs our code and images.

Our project will create separate tasks that will process CSS, JavaScript, and images. For CSS, we will combine all of the files into a single file and then preprocess it to enable additional features in our code. For JavaScript, we will combine the files, check the code for errors, and minify it to reduce the overall file size. For images, we will use a plugin to compress and optimize them so our project will load faster and more efficiently.

Using Gulp plugins

Without plugins, Gulp is simply a means of connecting and organizing small bits of functionality. The plugins we are going to install will add the functionality we need to properly...