Book Image

Node.js Blueprints

By : Krasimir Stefanov Tsonev
Book Image

Node.js Blueprints

By: Krasimir Stefanov Tsonev

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Node.js Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Discovering Gulp


Gulp is a build system that has become quite popular. It's almost the same concept as Grunt. We are able to create tasks that do something for us. Of course, there are a lot of plugins. In fact, most of the main Grunt plugins have equivalent plugins in Gulp. However, there are some differences, which are mentioned in the following points:

  • There is a configuration file, but it is called gulpfile.js

  • Gulp uses streams to process the files, which means that it doesn't create any temporary file or folder. This may lead to the better performance of the task runner.

  • Gulp follows the code-over-configuration principle, that is, while we set up the Gulp tasks, the process is like coding rather than writing the configurations. This makes Gulp friendly for the developers.

Installing Gulp and fetching plugins

Like Grunt, Gulp is available in the Node.js' package manager.

npm install -g gulp

The preceding command line will set up the task runner globally. Once the installation is complete...