Gulp

Published 2 March 2016, 142 words, 1-minute read

Metalsmith has plugins for CSS pre-processing with Sass, image minification, file concatenation, uglification and more. The build code will be familiar to anyone with Gulp experience.

Do you still need Gulp?

Metalsmith is often enough for simpler workflows. However, Gulp has a more extensive range of plugins and permits complex build activities such as linting and PostCSS processing with auto-prefixer.

Metalsmith can be used within any Gulp task, e.g.

var
    gulp       = require('gulp'),
    metalsmith = require('metalsmith'),
    publish    = require('metalsmith-publish'),
    markdown   = require('metalsmith-markdown');

// build HTML files using Metalsmith
gulp.task('html', function() {

    var ms = metalsmith(dir.base)
        .clean(false)
        .source('src/html/')
        .destination('build')
        .use(publish())
        .use(markdown())
        .build(function(err) {
            if (err) throw err;
        });

});

Further Gulp tasks can then be added. Note .clean(false) ensures Metalsmith never wipes the build folder when other tasks are active.

There are a number of Gulp/Metalsmith integration plugins although they are rarely necessary.