Cancel Build if Task Runner Explorer Task Fails

Question

I am using visual studio task runner (2015) to run a Gulp task bound to before build.

I have set it up so that when the gulp tasks fails it sends exit code 1 and at the

Answer 1

I implemented davidmdem's solution above and it was great... on my system. I had gulp installed globally, but one of my coworkers did not, so the pre-build event would fail. Running gulp from Task Runner Explorer uses the project-level gulp installation, but running gulp from the pre-build script uses the global gulp installation.

To prevent the situation where a new developer doesn't have gulp installed, I expanded davidmdem's pre-build script to the following: (gulp --version || npm install -g gulp@3.9.0) & gulp -b $(ProjectDir) --gulpfile $(ProjectDir)gulpfile.js my-task

This command installs gulp (version 3.9.0 to match the project-level gulp installation) only if it is not already installed. Now gulp is not something that you have to think about before you can build the project!

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(Update:)

An alternative (in my opinion: better) solution to this problem is to use npm as an intermediary. Continuing and modifying from the example above, I have a gulp task my-task that is being called from the command line. This removed the global gulp dependency and still properly stops msbuild if gulp fails.

Pre-build event:

npm run build

package.json:

"scripts": {
  "build": "gulp min"
}