Devour

Wrapper for gulp projects to provide a lot of syntactic sugar and re-use

Install

npm install --save-dev devour

Concept

Devour provides a thin wrapper for gulp, enabling the use of tasks and pipes defined in separate files. All of the files will be loaded when devour is activated, then you specify which tasks should be build and whether or not to watch for changes.

Usage

As devour is designed to incorporate gulp, you simply include it in your (existing) gulpfile.js, it will not get in the way of your current tasks (as long as there are no task-name collisions, of course).

Starting

Devour installs two cli commands; devour and gulp. Both of these will start Devour (although the gulp command will inform you it was devoured). As with gulp itself, you can specify which tasks to run by providing them on the command line, for example:

devour myTask myOtherTask mySpecialTask

Will try to start (in order) myTask, myOtherTask, mySpecialTask. Whichever ones are found to be actual tasks are executed, feedback is provided on which tasks are running and which were not found. The provided tasks will only run once, and once all are done, Devour will exit. NOTE: when running specific tasks, the verbosity is set to false in order to reduce the output.

gulpfile.js

As devour is based on the concept of moving tasks into separate files, you (should) end up with a very clean gulpfile.js.

Without devour

Considering this example based on a normal (rather simple) gulpfile.js

var gulp = require('gulp'),
	concat = require('gulp-concat'),
	uglify = require('gulp-uglify'),
	minifycss = require('gulp-minify-css'),
	rename = require('gulp-rename');

gulp.task('combine_script', function() {
	gulp.src('./src/**/*.js')
		.pipe(concat())
		.pipe(rename(function(file) {
			file.basename = 'combine';
		}))
		.pipe(gulp.dest('./dist'))
		.pipe(uglify())
		.pipe(rename(function(file) {
			file.basename += '.min';
		}))
		.pipe(gulp.dest('./dist'))
	;
});

gulp.task('combine_style', function() {
	gulp.src('./src/**/*.css')
		.pipe(concat())
		.pipe(rename(function(file) {
			file.basename = 'combine';
		}))
		.pipe(gulp.dest('./dist'))
		.pipe(minifycss())
		.pipe(rename(function(file) {
			file.basename += '.min';
		}))
		.pipe(gulp.dest('./dist'))
	;
});

gulp.task('watch', function() {
	gulp.watch('./src/**/*.js', ['combine_script']);
	gulp.watch('./src/**/*.css', ['combine_style']);
});

gulp.task('default', ['combine_script', 'combine_style', 'watch']);

With devour

Now, let's move those parts around into a bunch of separate files

First, create a named "pipe", which is basically a plugin within your project

// file: gulp/pipe/combine.js
//  concatenate the input stream into a single file and name it combine.<extension>
//  this works the same for both javascript and stylesheets
module.exports = function(stream, devour) {
	return stream
		.pipe(devour.plugin('concat'))
		.pipe(devour.plugin('rename', function(file) {
			file.basename = 'combine';
		}))
		//  write the minified sources to the predefined destination
		.pipe(devour.write())
	;
};

Now create the tasks, one for javascripts (gulp/task/script.js) and one for stylesheets (gulp/task/style.js).

// file: gulp/task/script.js
//  concatenate scripts into a single file and uglify it
module.exports = function(stream, devour) {
	return stream
		//  call the named pipe 'combine'
		.pipe(devour.pipe('combine'))
		//  add some gulp plugins to do their magic
		.pipe(devour.plugin('uglify'))
		.pipe(devour.plugin('rename', devour.min))
		//  finally, write the minified sources to the predefined destination
		.pipe(devour.write())
	;
};

The task for stylesheets is similar, except it does not uglify but uses minify-css

// file: gulp/task/script.js
//  concatenate stylesheets into a single file and minify it
module.exports = function(stream, devour) {
	return stream
		//  call the named pipe 'combine'
		.pipe(devour.pipe('combine'))
		//  add some gulp plugins to do their magic
		.pipe(devour.plugin('minify-css'))
		.pipe(devour.plugin('rename', devour.min))
		//  finally, write the minified sources to the predefined destination
		.pipe(devour.write())
	;
};

So, ready for the grande finale? Ok, here comes the gulpfile:

//  file: gulpfile.js
var Devour = require('devour'),
	devour = new Devour(); //  using all the default settings by not providing any of our own

devour
	.task('script', ['./src/**/*.js'])
	.task('style', ['./src/**/*.css'])
	.start()
;

Your project structure now looks somewhat like this:

/gulp
  /pipe
     combine.js
  /task
     script.js
     style.js
 gulpfile.js

What did we just do exactly? We have moved everything into separate files, these files all have a single job, be it a task or a re-usable pipe. You may also have noticed that there are no requires for the gulp-<plugins>, this is because devour will take care of loading any plugin for you. You still needs to add plugins to your project yourself!.

Further reading

• The API

License

GPLv2 © Konfirm