Gulp plugin?

[hamishtaplin]

Have you considered writing a Gulp plugin for this? Would be really nice to be able to pipe tests/results in to existing build processes.

[Hywan]

Hello :-),

I don't have enough skills for that, but feel free to do so! Sounds a good idea :-).

[hamishtaplin]

Just looking into the possibility right now. I think if the code was written as a module (ie. it exported an API) it would make this process a bit easier. Will let you know how far I get.

[Hywan]

@hamishtaplin Ok :-). Can't we just run a11ym in CLI?

[hamishtaplin]

@Hywan not sure what you mean, that's what it does currently?

[callumacrae]

For this to be suitable to be a gulp plugin, you'd have to have two things:

• First, it would need to be able to be called programmatically (e.g. as a requireable module). This would mean splitting the current a11ym file into two files: one containing the module, and another (probably in the bin directory) containing the commander stuff. This is probably best practice anyway.
• Secondly, it would need to accept files as inputs. Check out the plugin guidelines. This kind of behaviour just isn't suitable to be an actual gulp plugin. You could, however, call the module directory inside a gulp task if it were programmatically accessible!

[hamishtaplin]

That seems like a lot of re-factoring would need to happen, not sure you'd even be able to keep the existing implementation of it being accessible from CLI in that case. I might well be wrong though, not really my area of expertise.

[Hywan]

We can do such a refactoring. It's not going to be huge. We develop this tool very quickly because we were running out of time, but I will try to find more time to do that.

[Hywan]

Do you want to keep the crawler with Gulp? I guess yes.

[hamishtaplin]

Yes to the crawler :+1:

[Hywan]

Now it's my priority for this project :smiley:.

[Hywan]

Hello :-),

Now we have the lib/bin.js module, so I guess it will be easier to integrate it with Gulp. Thoughts?

[Hywan]

Example:

var a11ym = require('./lib/bin');
var options = {
    'errorLevel': 'warning',
    'maximumUrls': 42,
    'outputDirectory': '/dev/null' // oops
};
var inputs = ['http://example.org'];

a11ym.start(options, inputs);