Gulp Starter is a delicious blend of tasks and build tools poured into Gulp to form a full-featured modern asset pipeline. It can be used as-is as a static site builder, or can be configured and integrated into your own development environment and site or app structure. Checkout gulpfile.js/extras for Rails and Craft configurations.

git clone https://github.com/vigetlabs/gulp-starter.git MyApp
cd MyApp
npm install
npm run gulp

Demo compiled with gulp-starter: http://vigetlabs.github.io/gulp-starter/

(view files on gh-pages branch)

Features

CSS: Sass (indented, scss, or both)
- Libsass (node-sass) for super fast compiles
- Autoprefixer
JS: Modular ES6 with Babel and Webpack
- Async requires
- Multiple bundles
- Shared modules
- Source Maps
HTML: Static templating with Nunjucks and gulp-data
Images:
- SVG Sprites: Compiles a spritesheet from a folder of SVGs
- Compression with image-min
Fonts:
- Icon Fonts: Generate from a folder of SVGs
- Folder and .sass mixin for including WebFonts
Development Mode:
- File Watching and Live Reloading with BrowserSync
- Source Maps
Production Builds:
- JS and CSS are uglified and minified
- All filneames are revisioned with an md5 hash, a rev-manifest.json file is genrearted and all asset references are updated in html, css, and js
- File size reporting
- Local production sever for testing
Testing:
- JS test examples with Karma, Mocha, Chai, Sinon
- Travis CI integration
Deployment:
- Quickly deploy public folder to gh-pages (gulp deploy task)

Basic Usage

Make sure Node 0.12.x is installed. I recommend using NVM to manage versions.

Install Dependencies

npm install

Start compiling, serving, and watching files

npm run gulp

(or npm run development)

This runs gulp from ./node_modules/bin, using the version installed with this project, rather than a globally installed instance. All commands in the package.json scripts work this way. The gulp command runs the default task, defined in gulpfile.js/tasks/default.js.

All files will compile in development mode (uncompressed with source maps). BrowserSync will serve up files to localhost:3000 and will stream live changes to the code and assets to all connected browsers. Don't forget about the additional BrowserSync tools available on localhost:3001!

To run any other existing task, simply add the task name after the gulp command. Example:

npm run gulp production

Configuration

Directory and top level settings are convienently exposed in gulpfile.js/config.json. All task configuration objects have src and dest directories specfied. These are relative to root.src and root.dest respectively. Each configuration also has an extensions array. This is used for file watching, and file deleting/replacing.

If there is a feature you do not wish to use on your project, simply delete the configuration, and the task will be skipped.

Run JavaScript Tests

npm run test

Test files located in __tests__ folders are picked up and run using Karma, Mocha, Chai, and Sinon. The test script right now first compiles a production build, and then, if successful runs Karma. This is nice when using something like Travis CI in that if an error occurs during the build step, Travis alerts me that it failed. To pass, the files have to compile properly AND pass the JS tests.

Build production-ready files

npm run production

This will compile revisioned and compressed files to ./public. To build production files and preview them localy, run

npm run demo

This will start a static server that serves your production files to http://localhost:5000. This is primarily meant as a way to preview your production build locally, not necessarily for use as a live production server.

Deploy to gh-pages

npm run deploy

This task compiles production code and then uses gulp-gh-pages to push the contents of your dest.root to a gh-pages (or other specified) branch, viewable at http://[your-username].github.io/[your-repo-name]. Be sure to update the homepage property in your package.json.

GitHub Pages isn't the most robust of hosting solutions (you'll eventually run into relative path issues), but it's a great place to quickly share in-progress work, and you get it for free.

Divshot and Surge.sh are a couple great alternatives for production-ready static hosting to check out, and are just as easy to deploy to. Where ever you're deploying to, all you need to do is npm run gulp production and transfer the contents of the public folder to your server however you see fit.

Task Details

JS

gulpfile.js/tasks/webpackWatch
gulpfile.js/tasks/webpackProduction

Modular ES6 with Babel and Webpack

I've included various examples of generating mulitple files, async module loading and splitting out shared dependences to show the power of Webpack. Adjust the webpack config (.gulpfile.js/config/webpack) to fit your project. For smaller one-pagers, you'll probably want to skip the async stuff, and just compile a single bundle.

There are a couple of webpack options exposed in the top-level gulpfile.js/config.json file.

entries: Discrete js bundle entry points. A js file will be bundled for each item. Paths are relative to the javascripts folder. This maps directly to webpackConfig.entry.

extractSharedJs: Creates a shared.js file that contains any modules shared by multiple bundles. Useful on large sites with descrete js running on different pages that may share common modules or libraries. Not typically needed on smaller sites.

If you want to mess with the specifics of the webpack config, check out gulpfile.js/lib/webpack-multi-config.js.

CSS

gulpfile.js/tasks/css

Your Sass gets run through Autoprefixer, so don't prefix! The examples use the indented .sass syntax, but use whichever you prefer.

HTML

gulpfile.js/tasks/html

Robust templating with Nunjucks. Nunjucks is nearly identical in syntax to Twig (PHP), and replaces Swig (and Twig-like js templating language), which is no longer maintained.

A global data file is set up at src/html/data/global.json, is read in by the html task, and exposes the properties to your html templates. See social-icons-font.html for example usage.

Fonts

gulpfile.js/tasks/fonts

All this task does is copy fonts from ./src/fonts to ./public/fonts. A sass +font-face mixin is included in ./src/stylesheets/base/mixins.

IconFont

gulpfile.js/tasks/iconFont

SVGs added to src/icons will be automatically compiled into an iconFont, and output to ./public/fonts. At the same time, a .sass file will be output to src/stylesheets/generated/_icons.sass. This file contains mixins and classes based on the svg filename. If you want to edit the template that generates this file, it's at gulpfile.js/tasks/iconFont/template.sass

Usage:

With generated classes:

<span class="icon -twitter"></span>

With mixins:

.lil-birdy-guy
  +icon--twitter

.lil-birdy-guy {
  @include icon--twitter;
}

<span class="lil-birdy-guy"></span>

Don't forget about accessibility!

<span aria-label="Twitter" class="icon -twitter"></span>
<!-- or -->
<div class="icon -twitter"><span class="screen-reader">Twitter</span></div>

SVG Sprites

gulpfile.js/tasks/svgSprite

SVGs sprites are super powerful. This particular setup allows styling 2 different colors from your css. You can have unlimited colors hard coded into your svg.

In the following example, the first path will be red, the second will be white, and the third will be blue. Paths without a fill attribute will inherit the fill property from css. Paths with fill="currentColor" will inherit the current css color value, and hard-coded fills will not be overwritten, since inline styles trump css values.

.sprite
  fill: red
  color: white

  <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
    <path d="..."/>
    <path fill="currentColor" d="..."/>
    <path fill="blue" d="..."/>
  </svg>

I've included a helper to generate the required svg markup in src/html/macros/helpers.html, so you can just do:

  {{ sprite('my-icon') }}

Which spits out:

  <span class='sprite -my-icon'>
    <svg viewBox="0 0 1 1"><use xlink:href='images/spritesheets/sprites.svg#my-icon' /></use></svg>
  </span>

I recommend setting up your SVGs on a 500 x 500 canvas, centering your artwork, and expanding/combining any shapes of the same color. This last step is important.

Static Files (favicons, app icons, etc.)

There are some files that belong in your root destination directory that you won't want to process or revision in production. Things like favicons, app icons, etc., should go in src/static, and will get copied over to public as a last step (after revisioning in production). Nothing should ever go directly in public, since it gets completely trashed and re-built when running the default or production tasks.

Notable changes from 1.0

Full asset pipeline and static html compilation
gulpfile.js is now a directory
update directory structure
Replaced Browserify with Webpack!
- Async CommonJS module requires
- Automatically splits out shared dependencies
New html task w/ Nunjucks templating/compiling
Replace CoffeeScript with ES6 (Babel.js)
New server task to test production files locally
New deploy task to deploy the public directory to gh-pages
New rev task that revisions filenames and compress css and js
Use gulp-watch instead of gulp.watch (correctly handles new files)
New production task runs tests, compression + filename revisioning
Remove old examples and extraneous dependencies
Upgrades dependencies
Added example Travis CI integration that runs karma tests and production build
Add SVG sprite implementation from @synapticism in #100

Check out other open source work happening at Viget on code.viget.com

Visit code.viget.com to see more projects from Viget.

BigRoma / gulp-starter