This is a boilerplate for LilyPond music notation projects. It uses gulp and gulp-exec to execute the lilypond command and compile the notation PDF each time a LilyPond file is changed.

Open your preferred CLI and type lilypond -v to check that LilyPond is installed and what version you are running. If it is not installed, follow the command line installation instructions on lilypond.org.

Next, run npm install. Once this is completed, you should be ready to go! Run gulp watch to compile example.ly each time a LilyPond file is changed and saved.

For help with LilyPond markup, see the LilyPond docs.

A lot of PDF viewers (Preview, Acrobat, etc.) don’t refresh the PDF view each time it is updated. I recommend finding a text editor setup that allows you to view your LilyPond markup alongside the PDF and refreshes the PDF on each compile.

Personally, I prefer Atom for this. I use the AtLilyPond package for syntax highlighting and pdf-view for PDF viewing.

Also, note that the gulp watch command will crash when you have major errors in your LilyPond markup. If your PDF isn’t updating when you make changes, that’s the first thing to check.