How to install Gulp 4 before it’s officially released

15Jan

How to install Gulp 4 before it’s officially released

With Gulp 4 still approaching its official release date many would like to install it now and take advantage of the cool goodies the new v4 comes with. We’ve also switched to Gulp 4 a few weeks ago and couldn’t be happier.

Please note, this installation assumes replacement of the previous version of Gulp with the new Gulp 4 version. It’s possible to keep them both, but I neither have tested that yet, nor had any project requirements to do so. For the complete replacement, please follow these instructions until v4 is officially released on npm:

# Uninstall previous Gulp installation and related packages, if any
$ npm rm gulp -g
$ npm rm gulp-cli -g
$ cd [your-project-dir/]
$ npm rm gulp --save-dev
$ npm rm gulp --save
$ npm rm gulp --save-optional
$ npm cache clean

# Install the latest Gulp CLI tools globally
$ npm install gulpjs/gulp-cli -g

# Install Gulp 4 into your project from 4.0 GitHub branch as dev dependency
$ npm install gulpjs/gulp#4.0 --save-dev

# Check the installed versions. Make sure your they are not lower than shown below.
$ gulp -v
---
[10:48:35] CLI version 1.2.2
[10:48:35] Local version 4.0.0-alpha.2

Your new v4 version should be ready to use now. Here is a sample v4 gulpfile.js to get you started. Some samples are also available on the project’s 4.0 branch.

The Gulp 4 documentation effort is on the way and 4.0 has been in beta for quite a long time now. However, the code is very stable and we haven’t had any issues with it. Just be careful parsing existing docs. Some of it is still v3 specific and hasn’t been updated at the time of writing this post.

Today my environment was:

  • Gulp 4.0.0-alpha.2
  • node 6.4.0
  • npm 3.10.6
  • Mac OS X 10.11.6

Dmitri

Director of Technology

I am Dmitri Moore, a Director of Technology at ColdData and a hands-on coder for almost 2 decades now. During this time, I’ve seen many frameworks going from being super popular to fairly forgotten. So far, PEAN is my favorite stack. Let’s see how long this one is gonna stick around. Feel free to ping me with your own prognosis or just say “hi”.

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