Building and Running Your ASP.NET vNext Application with Gulp

Wanna see ASP.NET vNext and Gulp working together? You are at the right place :) Let's have look at gulp-aspnet-k, a little plugin that I have created for ASP.NET vNext gulp integration.
9 October 2014
2 minutes read
ASP.Net
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I love gulp! It has been only a few weeks since I started getting my hands dirty with gulp but it’s ridiculously simple and good. I am actually using gulp with one of my ASP.NET vNext applications to see how they fit together. I am compiling my less files, doing concatenation and minification for scripts/styles files with gulp. It’s also extremely comforting that gulp has file watch capability. For example, I can change my less files during the development and they are being recompiled as I save them:

gulp-watch

As I am working with my ASP.NET vNext application in this project, I found myself jumping between command prompt windows. I imagined for a second that it would be cool to have a gulp plugin for ASP.NET vNext to build and run the application. It would also take advantage of k --watch so that it would restart the host when any code files are changed. Then, I started digging into it and finally, I managed to get gulp-aspnet-k (ASP.NET vNext Gulp Plugin) out :) gulp-aspnet-k is also available on npm and you can install it right from there. Check out the readme for further info about its usage.

This is an insanely simple plugin which wraps kpm and k commands for you. In its simplest form, its usage is as below:

var gulp = require('gulp'),
    aspnetk = require("gulp-aspnet-k");

gulp.task('default', function(cb) {
    return gulp.start('aspnet-run');
});

gulp.task('aspnet-run', aspnetk());

You can find a sample application that uses gulp-aspnet-k plugin in my ASP.NET vNext samples repository: GulpSample. It is also working with gulp watch in peace.

image

Be sure to watch the following short video of mine to see this tiny plugin in action.

ASP.NET vNext with Gulp from Tugberk Ugurlu on Vimeo.

Keep in mind that, currently, this only works on windows :s Also remember that little things matter in your daily life and this thing is one of them :)