How to run Gulp tasks sequentially one after the other

It's not an official release yet, but the coming up Gulp 4.0 lets you easily do synchronous tasks with gulp.series. You can simply do it like this:

gulp.task('develop', gulp.series('clean', 'coffee'))

I found a good blog post introducing how to upgrade and make a use of those neat features: migrating to gulp 4 by example

By default, gulp runs tasks simultaneously, unless they have explicit dependencies. This isn't very useful for tasks like clean, where you don't want to depend, but you need them to run before everything else.

I wrote the run-sequence plugin specifically to fix this issue with gulp. After you install it, use it like this:

var runSequence = require('run-sequence');

gulp.task('develop', function(done) {
    runSequence('clean', 'coffee', function() {
        console.log('Run something else');
        done();
    });
});

You can read the full instructions on the package README — it also supports running some sets of tasks simultaneously.

Please note, this will be (effectively) fixed in the next major release of gulp, as they are completely eliminating the automatic dependency ordering, and providing tools similar to run-sequence to allow you to manually specify run order how you want.

However, that is a major breaking change, so there's no reason to wait when you can use run-sequence today.

The only good solution to this problem can be found in the gulp documentation:

var gulp = require('gulp');

// takes in a callback so the engine knows when it'll be done
gulp.task('one', function(cb) {
  // do stuff -- async or otherwise
  cb(err); // if err is not null and not undefined, the orchestration will stop, and 'two' will not run
});

// identifies a dependent task must be complete before this one begins
gulp.task('two', ['one'], function() {
  // task 'one' is done now
});

gulp.task('default', ['one', 'two']);
// alternatively: gulp.task('default', ['two']);