Invoking the Gulp tool programmatically

I am trying to invoke Gulp within another Node.js script. Is there any non-hackish way to do this? e.g. by not manually requiring bin/gulp.js or setting up a new Liftoff({ ... }), or running the command in the shell as is done at the moment in this plugin I’m currently working on?

To be more general I’m asking if there’s an official way to run Gulp as a part of another tool, without the extra overhead of spawning a new child process. A meta-API, if you like.

I think this is somewhat related to issue #755, except that no gulpfile has been loaded yet.

[yocontra]

nah heres how you really do it

var gulp = require('gulp');
require('./gulpfile');

if (gulp.tasks.test) { 
    console.log('gulpfile contains task!');
    gulp.start('test');
}

a gulpfile is just a node script, so you can require it in like any other.

As they said though, .start will be gone in 4.0 and replaced with series and parallel

[stringparser]

Ok, vanilla gulp

var gulp = require('gulp');
process.nextTick(function(){
 var tasks = gulp.tasks;
 if( gulp.myTask ){ gulp.start('myTask'); }
});

in gulp@4.0 gulp.start will be removed in favor of gulp.series and gulp.parallel, which are really cool by the way. So beware of changing that in the future.

Using the plugin I wrote

var runtime = require('gulp-runtime');
process.nextTick(function(){ 
 runtime.input.write('myTask\n');
})

which is the same as you wrote in the shell the task and pressed enter. The repl is something more of a feature. It can work without stdin and stdout, but I have yet to document it better.

Anyhow the first option will serve you good if your aim is simpler.