Sometimes, you'll want to hook your own Gulp tasks into Elixir. Perhaps you have a special bit of functionality that you'd like Elixir to mix and watch for you. No problem!

As an example, imagine that you have a general task that simply speaks a bit of text when called.

gulp.task("speak", function() {
    var message = "Tea...Earl Grey...Hot";

    gulp.src("").pipe(shell("say " + message));
});

Easy enough. From the command line, you may, of course, call gulp speak to trigger the task. To add it to Elixir, however, use the mix.task() method:

elixir(function(mix) {
    mix.task('speak');
});

That's it! Now, each time you run Gulp, your custom "speak" task will be executed alongside any other Elixir tasks that you've mixed in. To additionally register a watcher, so that your custom tasks will be re-triggered each time one or more files are modified, you may pass a regular expression as the second argument.

elixir(function(mix) {
    mix.task('speak', 'app/**/*.php');
});

By adding this second argument, we've instructed Elixir to re-trigger the "speak" task each time a PHP file in the "app/" directory is saved.

For even more flexibility, you can create full Elixir extensions. Using the previous "speak" example, you may write an extension, like so:

var gulp = require("gulp");
var shell = require("gulp-shell");
var elixir = require("laravel-elixir");

elixir.extend("speak", function(message) {

    gulp.task("speak", function() {
        gulp.src("").pipe(shell("say " + message));
    });

    return this.queueTask("speak");

 });

请注意我们 扩增（ extend ） Elixir 的 API 时所使用的第一个参数，稍后我们需要在 Gulpfile 中使用它，以及建立 Gulp 任务所使用的回调函数。

如果你想要让你的自定义任务能被监控，只要在监控器注册就行了。

this.registerWatcher("speak", "app/**/*.php");

这行程序的意思是指，当符合正则表达式 app/*/.php 的文件一经修改，就会触发 message 任务。

很好！接着你可以将这行程序写在 Gulpfile 的顶端，或者将它放到自定义任务的文件里。如果你选择后者，那么你必须将它加载至你的 Gulpfile，例如：

require("./custom-tasks")

大功告成！最后你只需要将他们结合。

elixir(function(mix) {
    mix.speak("Tea, Earl Grey, Hot");
});

加入之后，每当你触发 Gulp，Picard 就会要求一些茶。