Wrapping my gulpfile in an immediately-invoked function expression

Question

Looking at my gulpfile I just realized I must be declaring all of my variables on the global scope.

My gulpfile looks pretty typical (not unlike this one), with a bunch of vars declared at the top of the file.

var gulp = require('gulp');
var browserify = require('gulp-browserify');
var concat = require('gulp-concat');
var less = require('gulp-less');
var refresh = require('gulp-livereload');
var minifyCSS = require('gulp-minify-css');

But this suggests to me that all of these vars at the top of the file are just being slapped onto the global object.

Am I being dumb? Should I be wrapping my gulpfile in an IIFE?

And if so, why am I not seeing examples of a gulpfile within an IIFE anywhere online?

Answer 1

gulpfile runs in node, not in browser. In browser these variables would be defined as global. In node this is different. Right from the docs

The top-level scope is not the global scope; var something inside a Node module will be local to that module

So it is OK to define variables without IIFE in gulpfile

Answer 2

Remember that gulp runs in node an in node the behavior of globals is different than the browser.

In browsers, the top-level scope is the global scope. That means that in browsers if you're in the global scope var something will define a global variable. In Node this is different. The top-level scope is not the global scope; var something inside a Node module will be local to that module.

So those variables are not globals. Node works a little different than the browser so you should read the docs to learn the difference