How to prevent Gulp from crashing all the time

When you're working with Sass and use Gulp to compile your  .scss files it can happen that you introduce an error by accident. You misspell one of your mixins or variables and gulp-sass will throw an error. When this happens your Gulp task crashes and you have to restart it. When I started using Gulp this drove me crazy and I really wanted a solution for this problem.

Gulp-plumber

The solution I found is called gulp-plumber. This nifty plugin catches stream errors from other plugins and allows you to handle them with a custom handler. You can also let gulp-plumber handle the errors, it outputs them to your console by default. So when a plugin encounters an error you will be notified of the error and you can easily fix it without having to restart your Gulp task.

Example code

gulp.task('scss', function(){
    gulp.src('/**/*.scss')
        .pipe(plumber())
        .pipe(sass())
        .pipe(gulp.dest('/css/'));
});

The above example takes all scss files as input and then 'activates' gulp-plumber. After doing this you can use gulp like you are used to. Whenever an error occurs after activating plumber it will be caught and handled so gulp doesn't crash on you. That's it, hopefully this is helpful to you. If you have questions about this quick tutorial you can find me on Twitter.