Using gulp to help streamline the Skinning process

In an attempt to make the skinning process more streamlined and to lessen the need to continuously do deployments to compile the .less files, I have created a gulp file that will assist in automating the .less compilations and deploy the files to Tomcat.

Overview

The general workflow is as follows:

1. Fire up gulp
2. Make your change to the skin .less file
3. Save your changes
4. gulp detects the change and fires off a task to compile the .less
5. Once the gulp Less task is complete, it copies the generated .css to the Tomcat uPortal instance
6. Switch to browser and hit refresh to see your changes

Requirements

node.js - Refer to http://nodejs.org/ for instructions for installing node.js

Installing gulp

It is highly recommended that you install gulp globally, since you may want to use  with the following command

npm install -g gulp

That is it!

Using gulp with uPortal

Common Issues

• Not seeing changes
  • Is there a gulp error?
  • is the skin correct?
  • is the destination path correct?
• Getting gulp errors