Chapter 3. A Gulp setup for local development
This chapter covers
- Dependency chains
- Sequential and parallel execution chains
- Watch processes
- On-demand development servers with live reload capabilities
In the previous chapter you learned how to use Gulp to create build pipelines to allow for a chain of different file transformations. You selected files according to different patterns, created a stream of data out of them, and transformed their contents by using several Gulp plugins, each designed to fulfill a special task.
Even though you created different processes and were able to run a multitude of transformations by the simple click of a button, you’re still a few steps away from the bigger and more comprehensive concept of automation. As the term automation might suggest, you’re aiming for a collection of processes bound together in a system that does a set of tasks automatically and without your explicit intervention. In other words, you start your finely tuned task collection and let your automation tool do the rest for you during the entire development lifecycle.