You've gotten to see how to install Gulp.

Now it's time to start crafting your first task.

I'm back in the terminal in my project repository again.

I can see all my files here.

Remember, you can follow along by cloning the GitHub repository and

checking out the branch that corresponds to this video.

So, let's do that.

Keep in mind that there's also instructions on how to do that in

the repa read me.

Now, I can see that I have Gulp installed.

There's no Gulp file.

And if you remember, the Gulp file is where the Gulp engine looks for

your tasks.

So, let's add one.

I'm going to add the file literally named gulp dot js,

and I can do this in my text editor by adding new file.

My machine is actually setup to run sublime text commands from the terminal.

So I can just run subl gulpfile.js to create a new file called gulp file.

And when I save the file, it gets persisted here,

for advanced users, I just wanna point out

that you can actually name the file whatever you'd like.

However, it does take some extra options when running Gulp commands.

Since Gulp will automatically look for a file called

gulpfile.js, that is what we'll use in this course.

Now check out the teacher's notes for

an example of using a file not named gulpfile.js to define your tasks.

The first thing I'm going to add in the file is the use strict statement.

The use strict statement causes the node engine to run the file

in a strict interpretation of the JavaScript.

Feel free to check out my workshop on the use strict statement, to see why this

is a really great idea and there's a link to that in the teacher's notes.

Now, I'm gonna load the gulp module by requiring it and

assigning it to the variable gulp.

[SOUND] Requires a node method and if you haven't used node before,

check out some of the other Treehouse courses that go in depth with node basics.

There's also a link to those in the teachers notes.

We'll use the variable name gulp because it is typically a best practice

to name the variable after the module.

However, you don't have to and we'll actually see several instances in this

course where it won't make sense to do so.

The final thing that Gulp needs is for us to define a task.

To do this, we're going to use Gulp's task method.

The task method will receive the name of a task as the first parameter.

In our case, we're gonna name it, hello.

And it takes an anonymous function as the second parameter.

Which serves as a task call back and

executes any number of things you want it to.

For now we're simply gonna log a string.

Later we'll see how to replace this function to do some useful work, now

at this point, I can actually run the task by typing in gulp hello, just like this.

And don't forget to save your file.

Now when I run gulp hello I can see that gulp started the hello task.

It did something very trivial and simple for me.

And then it finished it.

Notice that I had to add the name of the task

when I invoked gulp from the terminal.

It will be a lot easier if I just typed gulp and gulp knew which task to run.

That could actually be done, we just need to set up a default task.

To do this, I'll use the task method again.

This time I am literally going to call the task default.

This is a special task in Gulp, and it's used when you wanna

define a task that's run, when Gulp isn't given any arguments.

And this time, instead of providing a function as a second parameter,

I'm going to provide an array of dependencies.

Now, we only have one other task defined so far.

We're gonna make that task a dependency of the default task.

When we say dependency, what we mean is that Gulp is going to run every

dependency before it starts running the default task.

And now for the work of our default task, we'll add another callback function,

and we'll log a string that will make it obvious what's going on.

Now let's run the default task by just typing in gulp on its own Great.

I can see that Gulp started the hello task, which was our dependency.

It did the work of the hello task, which was simply logging a string, in this case.

And then, it finished.

Now, after it finished, it started the default task.

Did the work of the default task and then finished.

Nice work getting Gulp up and running, and defining your first task.

After this code challenge, we're going to begin making our tasks useful for

our project.

Keep up the solid work.