Floaties for Gulp Users

In large or distributed teams, sharing knowledge about tooling can be a challenge. When a toolchain or pipeline gets to be big and contains a lot of code, that challenge grows with the size of the codebase. Providing a solution is as easy as describing your tasks.

gulp-assist

I recently put together gulp-assist as a tool to address that issue. An extension of sorts for Gulp, gulp-assist displays meaningful information on a tooling setup in a stylish format. How meaningful is completely up to the developer providing it.

What about the --tasks and --tasks-simple flags that Gulp already has? Those are great if one wants a basic idea of the structure of the tooling, but gives us nothing if we want to know about the individual tasks.

Floaties and Lifejackets

That all sounds lovely, but what’s this thing look like? GIMME’DA CASSHHH!. As run in the terminal:

And for each individual task including flags, and their descriptions:

Is purty no?

To Inflate, Pull Down On The Tab

This thing really is easy to use, and the few extra keystrokes it costs will undoubtedly save time down the road.

const gulp = require('gulp');

// initialize the module
require('gulp-assist')();

gulp.task('lint', () =>
	// ...
);

gulp.assist('lint', {
  desc: 'Analyzes code for errors and convention violations.',
  flags: {
    src: 'Specifies a directory / module to inspect, within the `src` directory.'
  }
});

Define your tasks as per usual, then register the task with gulp-assist. It’s important to note that gulp-assist needs the task defined with Gulp before it can be registered with gulp-assist. That’s an intentional design decision, but I’m always open to suggestions.

Alternatives

The great thing about Gulp is that there’s a slew of alternatives for any one thing you might want to get done. With that, you might enjoy gulp-help more so than my extension. It hooks the gulp.task method to allow for additional parameters that describe a task.

I didn’t care for this approach as I prefer separation of concerns and dislike modifying established API. I also prefer the output of gulp-assist (but I’m obviously biased).

Cheers!