I recently spent a productive weekend eventually learning gulp and after reading countless blog posts and tutorials, I finally managed to get a workflow together that worked perfectly for me - spinning up a local web server, SASS compilation, asset minification and js uglifying, as well as (cached) image optimisation, and last but not least, deploying.

If I remember correctly, the vast majority of this came from one source but I cannot remember where, so apologies for that.

The changes I made included using gulp-connect-php and figuring out how to get it to point to the app directory and how to run the watching and SASS compilation tasks upon starting the server.

After that, it just needed a teak to also compile the SASS before trying to minify the CSS.

Finally, the last bit of pain was trying to figure out the deployment - it worked fine but everything was under the dist directory which I didn't want, the rsyncConf.root = 'dist'; sorts that issue out.