#gulp.js

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Gulp – A streaming build system. Sometimes called a “task runner,” which is built on NodeJS.

Automation can literally save you hours a day. 

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Breaking code up into smaller, easier to swallow files is a key part of software design. It encourages modularity in your code and makes hunting for a specific feature much easier. Game programming is no exception to that, and it’s becoming more notable with component-based frameworks like Unity, Phaser 3, and Unreal 4.

Super Radish Witch is written with Phaser 2 and JavaScript. With the latter’s global scope issues, we’ve been keen to keep the source code as small and sparse as possible.

This is great, although adding a new source file means adding a new script tag to the game’s HTML document.

<script src="src/player.js"></script> <script src="src/badguy.js"></script> <script src="src/powerup.js"></script>

It works, but you can end up having a huge header just to get your game’s source loaded. We’ve employed gulp.js to avoid having to update the game’s HTML with each class. Using the gulp npm package and a gulpfile, files can be streamed and concatenated into one JavaScript file for the browser to load.

Setting up a gulpfile is pretty simple, so we’ll encourage the reader to Google up a tutorial. You can process your code with the gulp-concat plugin and put the result in a temporary build folder.

var gulp = require('gulp'); var concat = require('gulp-concat'); gulp.task('compilegame', function () { gulp.src('./src/**/*.js') // <-- the '**/*.js' checks subfolders .pipe(concat('main.js')) .pipe(gulp.dest('./build')); gulp.src('./index.html').pipe(gulp.dest('./build')); });

If you keep gulp running, it will watch for changes in the files and automatically process them when you update your code. The process is pretty quick, so builds don’t typically interrupt your workflow.

gulp.js is pretty modular too, so you can add plugins and other goodies, such as gulp-babel for ECMAScript 2015 support.

var babel = require('gulp-babel'); // ... gulp.src('./src/**/*.js') .pipe(concat('main.js')) .pipe(babel()) .pipe(gulp.dest('./build'));

There are a few caveats though. The gulpfile won’t watch for new files added, so you’ll need to restart gulp.js when you create the script for your latest game object. Also, if a gulp plugin throws an error, the process will stop. We’ve caught ourselves refreshing the page a few times wondering why our changes aren’t appearing.