Orange County WordPress Meetup: Gulp

Gulp is a javascript toolkit for repetitive task automation in the development process. It is an evolution from earlier task runner tools like Grunt. Gulp has a bit of an advantage over earlier tools in that it allows you to script the tasks that need to be managed ad hoc.

What Can You Manage?

One of the key advantages to using Gulp is the scripting of the compiling processes that you want to use in your workflow. You can set up a hit list of the different functions that you want to run on your files as you work with them. You can set exclusions for files that shouldn’t be modified as well.

There is a broad variety of functions that you can put into play. You can have your sass automatically compile to CSS on the fly, set up script minification, concatenation, or uglifying. You can set up and run unit tests, and set up translation checks. 

The list of plugins for Gulp just continues to grow. The tool is open source and you can support their efforts with donations or donate time to provide work to the project.

Why Would You Use Gulp?

The biggest advantage of a Gulp workflow is automation. It’s very easy to set up the list of functions that you want to perform on a site. But, it’s very easy to forget that you want to apply them each time you’re making a commit. It’s also easy to perform functions in an order that may not be optimized. 

By setting up your workflow once and watching the set of files you designate you’ll not only complete the function you want, but it will run the functions every time you change a file that needs that function applied.

Task managers are a great addition to your workflow and easy to modify over time so as your workflow changes, your Gulp scripts can adapt with the new requirements. If you have any questions about Gulp or setting up your workflow, be sure to reach out to us.