Gulp Task With Different Source Depending On Arguments

When working on a project that involves writing code and automating tasks using Gulp, you may come across situations where you need to handle different sources based on the arguments passed to your tasks. This can be a handy feature to have in your development workflow, allowing you to customize the behavior of your Gulp tasks dynamically. In this article, we will explore how you can achieve this functionality in your Gulp setup.

### Understanding Gulp Tasks and Arguments
Gulp is a popular build system that allows developers to automate repetitive tasks in their workflow. Tasks in Gulp are essentially functions that perform various actions such as minifying CSS, concatenating JavaScript files, or optimizing images. Arguments, on the other hand, are values that can be passed to Gulp tasks when running them from the command line.

### Implementing Conditional Source Handling
To implement a Gulp task with different source handling based on arguments, you can use conditional logic within your task definition. Let's say you have a task that processes CSS files from different directories depending on the arguments passed.

const gulp = require('gulp');

gulp.task('process-css', function() {
    let srcPath = 'default/css';

    if (process.argv.includes('--prod')) {
        srcPath = 'prod/css';
    }

    return gulp.src(srcPath + '/*.css')
        // Add your CSS processing logic here
        .pipe(gulp.dest('dist/css'));
});

In this example, we define a Gulp task named `process-css` that checks if the `--prod` argument is present when running the task. If the argument is detected, the task updates the `srcPath` variable to use a different directory for the source files. This way, you can switch between different source directories based on the arguments passed to the task.

### Running Gulp Tasks with Arguments
To run the `process-css` task with different source directories, you can use the following commands in your terminal:

gulp process-css

This will run the task with the default source directory.

gulp process-css --prod

This command will run the task with the production source directory.

### Conclusion
By incorporating conditional logic in your Gulp tasks, you can create more versatile and flexible automation scripts for your projects. Being able to handle different sources based on arguments adds another layer of customization to your build process, allowing you to adapt to different environments or requirements seamlessly.

Experiment with this approach in your own Gulp projects and see how it can streamline your development workflow. Customizing tasks based on arguments can help you maintain a more efficient and adaptable build process, ultimately contributing to a smoother development experience.