Using gulp with Visual Studio 2015

Lately I have been using gulp with the new Visual Studio 2015 integration, which I really like. With so much good tooling in place, I think it is the right step for Visual Studio to embrace it. The one thing that is cumbersome about the experience currently is the setup required to get up and running. So, hopefully I can save others from a bit of trial and error with these ourlined steps.

Install node (www.nodejs.org)
Open cmd and go to the root of you site
Run npm init
Include the new packages.json in the webproject
Run npm install gulp --save-dev
Add gulpfile.js to root of web project containing

var gulp = require('gulp');
gulp.task('default', [], function () { });

Now the basics are running, so you can go ahead and npm install <awesome-stuff> –save-dev and require to your hearts content.