A tour of Node building tools

In this series of articles, we'll explore popular Node based tools for building web applications. Although npm itself can be used for build automation (see "How to use npm as a build tool"), we will focus on specialised npm packages: grunt, gulp and broccoli. We will try to understand what problems they solve, how to use them and what their limitations are.

Those tools share a few traits in common:

• They are npm packages exposing an API
• A build file needs to be added to your project Gruntfile.js, gulpfile.js, brocfile.js...
• Plugins (npm packages) wrapping well-known npm packages (uglifyjs, jshint, less, etc...) need to be installed to perform specific tasks

Building with Grunt

• Part 1
• Part 2: caveats

Building with Gulp 3 and Gulp 4

Gulp 4 is not released yet, in the mean time you can install it following these instructions: Install Gulp 4

• Part 1: examples
• Part 2: Gulp's anatomy
• Part 3: writing transformers
• Part 4: incremental builds
• Part 5: caveats

Building with Brocooli

• Part 1: introduction

Recommended articles on the web

• How to use npm as a build tool
• Why gulp might not be the answer

Something wrong? Fix it on Github!