workflow

A simple, opinionated tool to manage your Gulp workflow

Workflow is here to help with standardising Gulp setups across multiple projects. It surfaces the main workflow tasks in a clean and concise manner making it simple for people to compile those applications.

Setup

Your gulpfile.js should only contain the main tasks that you should be run by yourself, contributors or CI environments. These are called tasks. These tasks can then run a series of other tasks or subtasks. Subtasks are more granular tasks that do one simple thing. The subtasks you pass to a given task are run through run-sequence allowing you to run them in series or parallel.

workflow has it's own ideas about where tasks should live.

+-- gulp
|   +-- config
|   |   +-- gulp.conf.js
|   +-- eslint.js
|   +-- build-js.js
|   +-- build-css.js
+-- package.json
+-- gulpfile.js

The config folder is where you can store configurations needed for your tasks, i.e. webpack.conf.js. If a gulp.conf.js file is present, then workflow will pick that up and pass it back to your tasks.

// gulpfile.js

// Import `workflow` into your `gulpfile`
const gulp = require('gulp');
const workflow = require('gulp-workflow');

// Load `workflow`, passing it your projects instance of `gulp`
workflow
    .load(gulp)
    .task('lint', 'Run all linters.', ['eslint'])
    .task('build', 'Build the application.', ['clean', ['build:js', 'build:css']])
    .task('ci', 'Lint, test and build the application.', ['lint', 'build', 'test'])
    .task('test', 'Run unit tests.', ['test:unit', 'test:e2e']);

// gulp/lint.js

// Subtasks are passed four arguments.
// The `$` is an object of available gulp plugins via gulp-load-plugins
// The config is whatever is in the `gulp.conf.js` file merged with any arguments
module.exports = (workflow, gulp, $, config) => {
    workflow.subtask('eslint', () =>
        gulp.src('**/*.js')
            .pipe($.eslint())
            .pipe($.eslint.format())
            .pipe($.if(config.env.ci, $.eslint.failAfterError()))
    );
};

Usage

Configuration

As mentioned before, you can create an optional gulp.conf.js file in the config folder. This file needs to export a plain object.

// gulp.conf.js

module.exports = {
    name: "Project Name",
    appDir: "./some/path"
};

Arguments

You may want to pass arguments to your tasks, i.e. gulp build --release. Any arguments will be merged with the configuration object and passed back to each task.

// gulp.conf.js

module.exports = {
    name: "Project Name",
    appDir: "./some/path",
    args: {
        release: true
    }
};

Running tasks

It's no different than using gulp.

gulp lint    // Will run the lint task
gulp build   // Will run the build task

You get a help task for free. It will display a list of the available tasks. Only the tasks will be displayed, keeping the subtasks hidden.

Usage
  gulp [TASK] [OPTIONS...]

Available tasks
  build  Build the application.
  ci     Lint, test and build the application.
  help   Display this help text.
  lint   Run all linters.
  test   Run unit tests.

Running subtasks

Again, they're just ordinary gulp tasks so you can run them individually, i.e. gulp eslint

API

load(gulp)

Requires an instance of gulp. Loads the subtasks present in the gulp folder.

task(name, description, [tasks], args || [options])

Takes a name, description, array of tasks to run when called and an object containing any arguments that can be passed. The array of tasks is passed to run-sequence so can support their syntax.

Alternatively, you can pass it an object of options which use the same arguments as keys.

subtask(name, dependencies, func)

Takes a name, any dependencies and array of tasks to run when called. This functions in exactly the same way as a normal gulp task.

Debugging

To make sure your tasks are being loaded correctly, you can run any gulp command with a debug flag

gulp lint --debug

License

MIT © Ben Holland