Send uglify parameter for certain flow in gulp

Question

Problem: Having multiple tasks for uglifying different javascript bundles and wanting to uglify this only on production with his own deploy task.

Solutions: Too much verbosity to define every task by itself. Using yargs for getting the parameters is also a too difficult approach for this problem.

Answer 1

Thought about this for a while, and came up with the perfect solution for myself.

For instance I have this gulp task that concatenates javascript files:

gulp.task('concat', function() {
  var stream = gulp
    .src('public/js/**/*.js')
    .pipe(concat('bundle.js'));
  if (ugly) {
    stream
      .pipe(uglify());
  }
  return stream
    .pipe(gulp.dest('public/dist'));
});

As you can see I check if the ugly variable is set within the task, so all I have to do is to create a task that is triggered before the concat task and sets the ugly variable to true.

You could make such a function, do make sure the ugly variable is accessible to the scope of both task functions.

var ugly;
gulp.task('set-ugly', function() {
  ugly = true;
});

Last but not least the gulp deploy task, with as first task set-ugly.

gulp.task('deploy', ['set-ugly', 'concat']);

You can also use this approach for any other variable that you need to use within a task.