Using gulp without global gulp //edit: and without linking to the bin js file

When you install it locally (npm install --save-dev gulp) you can just run it by calling ./node_modules/.bin/gulp all

Or you can define an npm script, and run it with npm run gulp

by adding this to package.json

"scripts": {
  "gulp": "gulp"
}

In package.json

"scripts": {
   "gulp": "gulp"  
},

And then this command npm run gulp Also npm provides the ability to pass extra parameters to your commands. This is only the case for npm >= 2.0

Update: Without bin link

You can check the node_modules/.bin/gulp or node_modules/gulp/bin/gulp.js file to see how you can start gulp (Line 129 is interesting)

I think this should work:

var gulp = require('gulp');

gulp.task('default', function() {
    console.log('do something');
});

gulp.start.apply(gulp, ['default']);