How do I use gulp with tape?

Question

I'm trying to integrate Gulp with Tape (https://github.com/substack/tape), the NodeJs test harness.

How can I do this? There doesn't seem to be an existing gulp plugin.

I've see this, but it looks really inelegant:

var shell = require('gulp-shell')

gulp.task('exec-tests', shell.task([
  'tape test/* | faucet',
]));

gulp.task('autotest', ['exec-tests'], function() {
  gulp.watch(['app/**/*.js', 'test/**/*.js'], ['exec-tests']);
});

I've tried this, which looks like it should work:

var tape = require('tape');
var spec = require('tap-spec');


gulp.task('test', function() {
    return gulp.src(paths.serverTests, {
            read: false
        })
        .pipe(tape.createStream())
        .pipe(spec())
        .pipe(process.stdout);
});

but I get a TypeError: Invalid non-string/buffer chunk error

Answer 1

Your "inelegant" answer is the best one. Not every problem can be best solved with streams, and using gulp just as a wrapper is not a sin.

Answer 2

Right, your task won't work because gulp streams are based on vinyl, a virtual file abstraction. I don't really think there's a good way of handling this in gulp, it seems like you should be using the tape API directly. I mean, you could put some gulp task sugar around it if you wish:

var test = require('tape');
var spec = require('tap-spec');
var path = require('path');
var gulp = require('gulp');
var glob = require('glob');

gulp.task('default', function () {
    var stream = test.createStream()
        .pipe(spec())
        .pipe(process.stdout);

    glob.sync('path/to/tests/**/*.js').forEach(function (file) {
        require(path.resolve(file));
    });

    return stream;
});

Seems kind of messy to me; not only because we're not using any of gulp's streaming abstractions, but we're not even putting it into a way that could hook into a gulp pipeline afterwards. Furthermore, you can't get gulp's task finished message when using this code either. If anyone knows a way around that then, please, be my guest. :-)

I think I would prefer to use tape on the command line. But, if you want all of your build step tasks in your gulpfile this might be the route to go.