When performing a global install of Gulp, should you install "gulp" or "gulp-cli"?

Question

The Gulp github page says to run

    npm install --global gulp-cli

but nearly every tutorial I've come across says to run

    npm install -g gulp

Is there any substantial difference between the two options?

Answer 1

They are two different modules, gulp is intended to be installed locally for the project, and gulp-cli globally, this allows you to use different versions of gulp for different projects.

It's mostly a legacy thing, in the past there were no gulp-cli. The gulp team got more knowledge and decided to split it up.

It's recommended to use gulp-cli globally, and gulp locally.

And the Getting Started documentation also prompts you, to delete any globally installed gulp module.

There is no difference between --global and -g the latter is just a shorthand flag.