Using pump instead of pipe

On thing that I quickly discovered whilst using Gulp to automate my development process, was the piping the results through from one plugin to another could often go wrong, and it was often hard to trap the reason and get proper error messaging out.

Then I discovered some example code which pointed me to pump.  Pump is...

a small node module that pipes streams together and destroys all of them if one of them closes

Essentially it allows you to restructure your Gulp task in a way that handles multiple plugins much better, and it fails more gracefully.

So I needed to include a copy of the new plugin at the top of my Gulp file...

var pump = require("pump");

Then I took the task which I wrote about in my last post...

gulp.task("js",function(cb) {

  browserify(jsFiles).bundle(),

    .pipe(source("script.js"))

    .pipe(gulp.dest("build/js"));

});

And re-wrote it to look like this...

gulp.task("js",function(cb) {

  pump([ 

    browserify(jsFiles).bundle(),

    source("script.js"),

    gulp.dest("build/js")

      ],cb); 
    });

As you can see, instead of using the "pipe" method to pass the files/content from one plugin to another, I am now passing an array of calls into pump and this is doing the hard work for me.

I have found that this makes the error messaging much more useful when I have syntax errors or plugins fail to work as expected.  It's certainly saving me a lot of time when it comes to debugging and fixing my Gulp file.