How can Gulp be restarted upon each Gulpfile change?

Question

I am developing a Gulpfile. Can it be made to restart as soon as it changes? I am developing it in CoffeeScript. Can Gulp watch Gulpfile.coffee in order to restart when changes are saved?

Answer 1

I created gulper that is gulp.js cli wrapper to restart gulp on gulpfile change.

You can simply replace gulp with gulper.

$ gulper <task-name> 

Answer 2

You can create a task that will gulp.watch for gulpfile.js and simply spawn another gulp child_process.

var gulp = require('gulp'),     argv = require('yargs').argv, // for args parsing     spawn = require('child_process').spawn;  gulp.task('log', function() {   console.log('CSSs has been changed'); });  gulp.task('watching-task', function() {   gulp.watch('*.css', ['log']); });  gulp.task('auto-reload', function() {   var p;    gulp.watch('gulpfile.js', spawnChildren);   spawnChildren();    function spawnChildren(e) {     // kill previous spawned process     if(p) { p.kill(); }      // `spawn` a child `gulp` process linked to the parent `stdio`     p = spawn('gulp', [argv.task], {stdio: 'inherit'});   } }); 

I used yargs in order to accept the 'main task' to run once we need to restart. So in order to run this, you would call:

gulp auto-reload --task watching-task 

And to test, call either touch gulpfile.js or touch a.css to see the logs.