`gulp.watch()` and the initial run

It’d be nice to allow starting an initial run for a gulp watch, e.g.:

gulp.task('watch', function() {
  return gulp.watch(['src/**/*.js', 'test/**/*.js'], {initialRun: true}, ['test.unit']);
});

Currently the only way to achieve this is to manually trigger a gulp.start, which is undocumented and thus a bit ugly.

[lholznagel]

When I understand your problem correctly, maybe this would help you:

gulp.task('watch', ['task.before.watch'], function() {
  return gulp.watch(['src/**/*.js', 'test/**/*.js'], ['test.unit']);
});

With this code, all tasks in the square brackets will start before the watch task. here is no need to use gulp.start

[phated]

3.x is feature locked and the file watcher is completely different in 4.0 where we just wrap chokidar. We don’t want to add extra functionality on top of chokidar.