In my previous blog post, I have written about how to use LiveReload Chrome extension, with Guard and some Ruby gems to make a web page automatically reload in a browser, Chrome browser to be specific. Just by reading this sentence, it already sounds like a complicated task. And indeed it is. Luckily, I have found a better solution: BrowserSync.

With LiveReload, you have to install browser extension, but BrowserSync uses Socket.io, so it can supports more than one browser at once. This is great for working with responsive design, where screens with different sizes are needed to be tested.

No need to install extension and support more than one browser are really big plus.

The following is a short instruction and some examples on how to use both BrowserSync and Gulp to automatically reload a web documentation page generated by Docco in any connected browser.

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.