Gradle plugin for Gulp

This is a very simple Gradle plugin for running gulp tasks part of the build. It merely wraps calls to "gulp xyz" as "gradle gulp_xyz" tasks. Gulp is installed locally using npm.

Installing the plugin

Releases of this plugin are hosted at Bintray and is part of the jCenter repository. Development builds are published for every commit to the master branch. These SNAPSHOTs are hosted on the OJO repository and to use them you will need to add OJO to your buildscript configuration.

Setup the plugin like this:

plugins {
  id "com.moowork.gulp" version "0.12"
  id "com.moowork.node" version "0.12"
}

Or:

buildscript {
  repositories {
    maven {
      url "https://plugins.gradle.org/m2/"
    }
  }

  dependencies {
    classpath 'com.moowork.gradle:gradle-gulp-plugin:0.12'
  }
}

apply plugin: 'com.moowork.gulp'

The plugin will also apply gradle-node-plugin for Node and NPM related tasks. (See http://github/srs/gradle-node-plugin for details).

Using the plugin

You can run gulp tasks using this syntax:

$ gradle gulp_build    # this runs gulp build
$ gradle gulp_compile  # this runs gulp compile

... and so on.

These tasks do not appear explicitly in gradle tasks, they only appear as task rule. Your gulpfile.js defines what gulp_* tasks exist (see gulp --tasks, or gradle gulp_--tasks).

Also (more importantly), you can depend on those tasks, e.g.

// runs "gulp build" as part of your gradle build
build.dependsOn gulp_build

This is the main advantage of this plugin, to allow build scripts (and gulp agnostics) to run gulp tasks via gradle.

It is also possible to run a gulp task only if one of its input files have changed:

def srcDir = new File(projectDir, "src/main/web")
def targetDir = new File(project.buildDir, "web")
gulp_dist.inputs.dir srcDir
gulp_dist.outputs.dir targetDir

Example build.gradle file

To get you started here is what it might look like to integrate this plugin to a Java project.

plugins {
	id "com.moowork.gulp" version "0.12"
	id "com.moowork.node" version "0.12"
}

apply plugin: "java"

// run npm install
gulp_default.dependsOn 'npmInstall'

// run gulp install
gulp_default.dependsOn 'installGulp'

// processResources is a Java task. Run the gulpfile.js before this task using the 'default' task in the gulpfile.js
processResources.dependsOn gulp_default

// if the /node_modules directory already exists somewhere other than at the base of where your build.gradle is
node {
	nodeModulesDir = file("WebContent")
}

// if the /node_modules directory already exists somewhere other than at the base of where your build.gradle is
//  plugin looks for gulp in the node_modules directory
gulp {
	workDir = file("WebContent")
}

Extended Usage

If you need to supply gulp with options, you have to create GulpTasks:

task gulpBuildWithOpts(type: GulpTask) {
   args = ["build", "arg1", "arg2"]
}

NPM helpers

The plugin also provides two fixed helper tasks to run once per project, which however require npm (https://npmjs.org/) to be installed:

• installGulp: This installs gulp to the project folder, using "npm install gulp"
• npmInstall: This just runs "npm install" (possibly useful for scripting)

Since gulp will only be installed in your project folder, it will not interact with the rest of your system, and can easily be removed later by deleting the node_modules folders.

So as an example, you can make sure a local version of gulp exists using this:

// makes sure on each build that gulp is installed
gulp_build.dependsOn 'installGulp'

// processes your package.json before running gulp build
gulp_build.dependsOn 'npmInstall'

// runs "gulp build" as part of your gradle build
build.dependsOn gulp_build

Configuring the Plugin

You can configure the plugin using the "gulp" extension block, like this:

gulp {
    // Set the directory where gulpfile.js should be found
    workDir = file("${project.projectDir}")

    // Whether colors should output on the terminal
    colors = true

    // Whether output from Gulp should be buffered - useful when running tasks in parallel
    bufferOutput = false
}

Automatically downloading Node

To simplify the build, you can say that the plugin should download Node and NPM automatically. The dependent gradle-node-plugin does the magic (http://github.com/srs/gradle-node-plugin). Set this configuration to enable:

node {
    // Version of node to use.
    version = '0.10.22'

    // Enabled the automatic download. False is the default (for now).
    download = true
}

Node will be installed in the .gradle folder for current user under nodejs subdirectory.

Getting latest npm on Ubuntu

See https://github.com/creationix/nvm on how to install npm via nvm.

Building the Plugin

To build the plugin, just type the following command:

./gradlew clean build