Simple bundle, minify and upload JS to SharePoint using Gulp

I recently started playing around with Gulp and was not really impressed until I came across the gulp-spsave plugin. This plugin will let you upload your JS/CSS files directly to SharePoint right from Visual Studio 2015! This meant that I no longer had to manually upload my JS files to SharePoint or use SharePoint Designer to edit my JS/CSS files!

This got me more interested in Gulp and I started exploring how can I further improve my debugging and build workflow with Gulp. After spending some more time, I came up with a basic workflow which will definitely get you interested in Gulp as a SharePoint/Office 365 Developer!

This is a simple workflow which will look for predefined JavaScript files in your Visual Studio 2015 project. If any of your files change, it will be bundled into a single JavaScript file, minified and uploaded to SharePoint.

Here is my project on GitHub: https://github.com/vman/SP-Simple-Gulp-Demo

The plugins used in this demo are:

gulp-concat : Used to bundle js files.

gulp-uglify : Used to minify the js files

gulp-rename : Used to rename the minified file to .min.js

gulp-spsave : Used to upload files to SharePoint

Here is the file structure of my Visual Studio 2015 project. It is a simple ASP.NET project where I have removed all unnecessary files. Since this is a strictly front-end/UI project, you could also open a folder in Visual Studio as described in this StackOverflow post.

After changing the scenario1.js file, I can see that the concat, minify and upload to sp tasks are triggered as well:


Thanks for reading!