There are many commands available to help you build and test sites. Here are a few highlights to get started with.
$ gulp serve
This outputs an IP address you can use to locally test and another that can be used on devices
connected to your network.
serve
does not use service worker
caching, so your site will stop being available when the web server stops running.
$ gulp
Build and optimize the current project, ready for deployment. This includes linting as well as image, script, stylesheet and HTML optimization and minification. Also, a service worker script will be automatically generated, which will take care of precaching your sites' resources. On browsers that support service workers, the site will be loaded directly from the service worker cache, bypassing the server. This means that this version of the site will work when the server isn't running or when there is no network connectivity.
$ gulp serve:dist
This outputs an IP address you can use to locally test and another that can be used on devices
connected to your network.
serve:dist
includes will serve a local copy of the built and optimized site generated as part
of the default
task.
Because the optimized site includes a service worker which serves your site directly from the
cache, you will need to reload the page after regenerating the site to pick up the latest changes.
serve:dist
uses a different HTTP port than serve
, which means that the service workers are
kept isolated in different scopes.
It is important to note a difference between the serve
and serve:dist
tasks.
serve
uses a no-opservice-worker.js
and cannot run offline.serve:dist
uses thesw-precache
-generated output and can run offline.
The serve
task runs on port 3000 and serve:dist
runs on port 3001.
The main purpose is to ensure that different service workers will not impact each other's environment.
Using the sw-precache
-generated output makes it very difficult to quickly test local changes which is not ideal for a development server environment.
$ gulp pagespeed
Runs the deployed (public) version of your site against the PageSpeed Insights API to help you stay on top of where you can improve.