VS2017 Task Runner Explorer No Tasks Found

I was faced the same issue, and fix this after running two commands. Please refer below the process:

1) Right click on your gulp file in visual-studio, and choose "Open Command Line > PowerShell"

2) Run the command npm install gulp for install gulp. (You have to install gulp in your project, no matter if you have already installed gulp globally, but in this case you have to install the gulp in your project)

and press enter.

3) After execution of command go to task runner explorer in Visual-Studio and press the refresh button.

After pressing the refresh button you will see all your task list under task runner.

If you found any error related to "missing module" in output window like below:

Then you have to install missing npm plugins, for this just run the below command (into powershell): npm install and press enter. This command will install all the missing plugin, refer below image:

And then press again the refresh button in task runner explorer and you will see all your gulp task list under task runner window.

Hope this solution will help.

Apparently you have to install gulp locally within your project for it to work properly with Visual Studio. Global install won't work. Deleting the global copy and installing it locally solved the problem.

You need to have all the dependencies installed too - my VS Task Runner was failing without any error messages on a new install - I had already installed gulp locally, but my gulpfile.js showed the following required modules:

var util = require('gulp-util'),
    gulp = require("gulp"),
    concat = require("gulp-concat"),
    cssmin = require("gulp-cssmin"),
    rename = require('gulp-rename'),
    babel = require('gulp-babel'),
    terser = require("gulp-terser")
    //del = require("del"); 
    ;

One of them was missing, so I ran

npm install gulp-util
npm install gulp-concat
npm install gulp-cssmin
npm install gulp-rename
npm install gulp-babel
npm install gulp-terser

And the task runner displayed my tasks - one of the modules weren't loading properly. Odd behaviour because the gulpfile.js and task runner were working correctly last week and the only changes made have been to install a few unrelated node modules locally.