Gulp API does not have a method to create an alias task. But, there are two ways to do this now:

1. Create a task alias by dependency
2. Create a task alias by duplication

Dependency

Gulp dependency system can be used to create an alias of a task:

gulp.task('task', function(){});
gulp.task('alias', ['task']);

Here, task alias is the alias of the task task. When list the tasks, it shows the dependency tree:

$ gulp --tasks
Tasks for ~/gulpfile.js
├── task
└─┬ alias
  └── task

When running the tasks, the dependency is obvious:

$ gulp alias
Starting 'task'...
Finished 'task' after 49 μs
Starting 'alias'...
Finished 'alias' after 6.83 μs

Duplication

Another way to create a task alias is by duplicating the task definition:

var task = function () {};    
gulp.task('task' , task);
gulp.task('alias', task);

But in this way, there is no implicit relationship that will indicates that one task is an alias of another. As you can see from the task list:

$ gulp --tasks
Tasks for ~/gulpfile.js
├── task
└── alias

To Gulp, there are two different tasks. But when the alias task is run, the console log is cleaner than the dependency one:

$ gulp alias
Starting 'alias'...
Finished 'alias' after 45 μs

Gulp is still involving, therefore, API might change regarding for creating alias of a task. At the moment, I like the second option. Alias and dependency are two different concepts. Dependency should be left as dependency. Alias is just another name to run the same task.