gulp-load-subtasks

2 min read Original article ↗

Hullo from Gulp Load Subtasks!

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What is this and why?

Do you have a long gulpfile?

Do you wish you could split it up into modules?

Modules, like, grouped task files; like, test.tasks.js and build.tasks.js.

Wouldn't that be nice?

If you'd like that, you're in luck! That's what Gulp Load Subtasks does!

🎉 Easy, not-so-ugly, auto-loaded subtasks! 🎉

How to install:

npm i --save-dev gulp-load-subtasks

Alternatives and Comparison:

  • gulp-hub
    • Multiple gulpfiles, not multiple modules
    • No globbing (?)
    • No coffee/livescript support (?)
    • Lets you have multiples of the same task and will run them all together
    • Intention: run Gulp tasks from multiple projects at once
  • require-dir
    • No globbing
    • Requires the directory's modules into an object
    • No coffee/livescript support (?)
    • Intention: ability to require a directory into any Node environment
  • gulp-load-subtasks (You are here!)
    • Supports globbing
    • Opinionated
    • Fully supports coffee/livescript tasks, gulpfiles
    • Works with and is heavily inspired by gulp-load-plugins
    • Intention: ability to import sets of related tasks into any Gulp environment

Basics

In its simplest form, gulp-load-subtasks can be passed some directory ('dir', relative to cwd) and it will find all files matching 'dir/**/*.tasks.js' and load those tasks. Here's that example in code:

require('gulp-load-subtasks')('dir')

You can pass optional additional arguments that will be passed on to all subtask functions, such as a plugin object from gulp-load-plugins.

You can also access loadSubtasks from your gulp-load-plugins object!

Example using gulp-load-plugins:

var gulp = require('gulp')

  , $    = require('gulp-load-plugins')()

$.loadSubtasks('dir', $)

You can also use gulp-load-subtasks with CoffeeScript and LiveScript!

Just change your require statement to

(require 'gulp-load-subtasks/coffee')('dir')

# in gulpfile.ls

(require 'gulp-load-subtasks/livescript')('dir')

and it will load dir/**/*.tasks.coffee or dir/**/*.tasks.ls by default instead.

Basic Example (with directory structure)

Directory structure:

+ gulpfile.js
|
+ tasks/
  + a.tasks.js
  + b.tasks.js

tasks/a.tasks.js:

module.exports = function (gulp) {

  gulp.task('subtaskA1', function () {

  })

  gulp.task('subtaskA2', function () {

  })

}

tasks/b.tasks.js

module.exports = function (gulp, $) {

  gulp.task('subtaskB', function () {

    gulp.src('*.sass')

      .pipe($.sass())

      .pipe(gulp.dest('sassy-css-goes-here'))

  })

}

gulpfile.js:

var gulp = require('gulp')

  , $    = require('gulp-load-plugins')()

$.loadSubtasks('tasks')

$.loadSubtasks('tasks/**/*.js')

$.loadSubtasks('tasks', $)

$.loadSubtasks('tasks', $, "hi mom", { a: "b" }, ...)

gulp.task('default', [ 'subtaskA1', 'subtaskB' ])