How do you handle dependencies and order of execution in Gulp?
Gulp handles dependencies and order of execution through task definition. To define a dependency, you list it in the second argument of gulp.task()
. For instance, if ‘js
’ depends on ‘clean
’, we write: gulp.task(‘js’, [‘clean’], function() {…})
. This ensures ‘clean
’ runs before ‘js
’.
For controlling order within tasks, Gulp 4 introduced series()
and parallel()
methods. The series()
method executes tasks sequentially, while parallel()
runs them concurrently. An example would be: gulp.series(‘task1’, ‘task2’)
or gulp.parallel(‘task1’, ‘task2’)
.
However, remember that Gulp operates on the principle of maximum concurrency. It will always try to execute as many independent tasks simultaneously as possible unless explicitly told otherwise.