It's great that TravisCI runs our tests automatically. But that's not the only task we want to automate. Of course, as JavaScript is an interpreted language, we don't have a compile step in our build process. There are other tasks we want to carry out though, for example, checking our code style, running integration tests, and gathering code coverage. We can make use of a build tool to automate these tasks and allow us to run them in a consistent manner. You may have used MSBuild for this in .NET before or Java tools such as Maven or Gradle.

There are several different build tools available for Node.js. The two most popular by far are Grunt and Gulp. Both have large communities and an extensive range of plugins for performing different operations. Grunt's model has each operation reading in files and writing back to the filesystem. Gulp uses Node.js streams to pipe processing from one operation to the next.

Grunt's model is slightly simpler and may be...