Developing on a Raspberry Pi using Gulpjs

21 Jan 2019

Developing on one machine and running on another is a tedious process but sometimes you need to when a library has different features for ARM vs x64 and the then there is always the Windows vs Linux issues. This was the issue I had when I was working on a Raspberry Pi project using Python, I got everything working on Windows and then copied it over to the Pi thinking the libraries would work the same between the two but they didn’t. After copying & pasting to a share a few times I realized that it was kind of annoying having to move my files to the share, kill the terminal and re-run the start command so I turned to everyone’s favorite task runner, Gulp and it was like greeting an old friend.

In order for this to work with a remote Linux machine, you need to install Putty which is a common SSH and telnet client for Windows. Once you install that you get a few programs that will allow you to easily copy files and run remote commands on your connected machine through a command line. There may be more than one way to do this same thing but this is just how I ended up doing it

Note: If plink and pscp aren’t in your PATH they are located inside C:\Program Files\PuTTY\

The folder structure of the project was pretty simple

⊢ gulpfile.js
⊢ src
  ⊢ main.py
  ⊢ lib.py

Then this is where the magic happened.

gulpfile.js

const
  gulp = require("gulp"),
  process = require("child_process");

const
  piName = '192.168.1.5',
  piUsr = 'myUser',
  piPwd = 'securePassword';

const spawnTask = (command, doneCallback) => {
  // run the task through the command line
  const proc = process.spawn("cmd.exe", ['/c', command])
  // log the output and errors to get some insights into what's going on
  proc.stdout.on('data', (output) => console.log(output.toString()));
  proc.stderr.on('data', (output) => console.log(output.toString()));
  // when the command line is done let the calling gulp taks know
  proc.once('close', doneCallback);
}

gulp.task("start", (done) => {
  // run the python command on the Pi
  // https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.70/htmldoc/Chapter7.html#plink
  spawnTask(`plink -ssh -l ${piUsr} -pw ${piPwd} "sudo python /home/pi/share/my_app/main.py"`, done);
});

gulp.task("move", (done) => {
  // copy the files from src to the working directory of the pi
  // https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.70/htmldoc/Chapter5.html#pscp
  spawnTask(`pscp -pw ${piPwd} -r ./src/*.* ${piUsr}@${piName}:/home/pi/share/my_app`, done);
});

// gulp 4 syntax - npm install gulp@next
// if you are using gulp 3 check out the npm package run-sequence
gulp.task('default', () => {
  return gulp.watch(['./src/*.py'], gulp.series('move', 'start'))
});

As you can see it doesn’t take much to accomplish this but child_process was something I had never used before this but it has come in handy a few times since then. Now when I develop on the Pi I can just run the default gulp task and everything copies over and runs pretty seamlessly.

Eric Ditter.com

Developing on a Raspberry Pi using Gulpjs