While I don’t want much of BootStrap’s CSS I would like to use some of its modules, like Modal, to save me reinventing that code. If I was using NuGet I would have had to go the bootstrap site and make a custom download, which I would have to redo if any new version came out. If I want to add another module, like tooltip, I just include those files in my build script too. Therefore I place the array of files in a json file which I store in the App_Data directory. You can see the complete version of my gruntfile.js here and the json file it reads here. copy-webpack-plugin – copies files from the source directory into the build/output directory. The two files that any project using Grunt must have in the root folder are package.json and Gruntfile.js.

Not anymore – it’s all about the power of SVG iconsets nowadays. The technique has been around for a while , but only recently became universally recognised. We use gulp-svgstore to automate the SVG symbols store generation, and load it in as a separate file. There are some compatibility issues, which are tackled by using svg4everybody. We also hand-pick the classes needed for the critical css, and generate the separate critical css blob for production build. This allows us to load CSS asynchronously using Filament group’s loadCSS technique, making the pages display much quicker. Every project starts small and grows into something big later.

Swapping From Bundleconfig To Grunt

Thankfully there’s a vast selection of tools that contribute towards achieving these lofty goals, but using them all during the development workflow quickly becomes repetitive and tiresome. This is where task runners come in, they help mitigate the problem by automating as much of the process as possible. In Grunt you configure what you want to happen, this generally takes the form of a JavaScript object with properties what is gulp and grunt defining the configuration of the tasks within your workflow. This works well once you know what you’re doing, but I found there was a learning curve to get to where you knew what you’re doing with your GruntFiles. Large and complex configurations can also be time consuming to read – it’s not particularly self-documenting. So it was with some scepticism I looked at Gulp, a new JavaScript task runner.

We need that configuration isolated into something Parcel can understand. My requirements for a task runner/web-app builder ‘thing’ are incredibly modest.

My Gulp File

I’ve updated the post to reflect the change to the Ruby Sass plugin. The errors aren’t too friendly, but it looks to me like the problem is with the gulp-ruby-sass section, but I’m completely new at this. I’ll paste the complete error at the end of the message. Gulp is definitely the best way forward, but reading the old documentation you will still see Grunt code examples. Hopefully users won’t think that Grunt is still the tool of choice at Google. This means we can also define tasks not called by the default task and just call them when needed. A couple of small changes have been made to the gulpfile to show how use can use JavaScript variables to define the source and destination folders used across the script.

Well, I have just recently started a new job so the decision to move to gulp was already made and I picked it up as a development task. The reason my work chose to switch was speed and ease of use . We have an overly long build script due to generating multiple themes for the site, there are more improvements we could make but this was a quick and safe solution that halved our build time. The second thing is the amount of compatible libraries that can easily be added. That is not to say there are millions of gulp specific plugins but it is very easy to use standard node libraries.

The base idea is that you glob for some files, and pipe them through a plugin, changing the output in some way or another. If you need a refresher on streams, the Streams handbook is the best place to go. Oh, and if you liked this post, I did a follow up on how to use npm as a build tool. Compare this to my job prior to that where we had hundreds of lines of Grunt config and tonnes of plugins including custom ones to do a similar set of tasks. If you’re building a modern JavaScript application or website, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the JavaScript Build Tool Landscape. The heavyweights of this world are Grunt and Gulp, although many, many others exist too.

Setup Your Project#

The advantage of Gulp’s code-over-configuration approach is that you end up with a cleaner and easier to read task file with greater consistency between tasks. Now you can run gulp watch in your command line, and the lint task will run whenever a JS file within the src directory changes. Firstly, gulp.src will return a representation of files that match the glob, that can be piped directly into plugins.

So it’s good to have a reminder if I forget to change a textdomain. The thing is, you have gulp setup, but it doesn’t currently do anything. One of the simplest tasks I have in my automation setup is checking theme textdomains are correct. It allows us to write ES6+ code and use JS modules natively.

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The HTTPS support is available from BrowserSync version 2.2 onwards – you can update easily by running. One of the key benefits of using BrowserSync, is that behind the scenes we smooth over all of the differences between use-cases. We’ve gone to extreme lengths to ensure that HTTPS support works seamlessly in all three modes. So, whether you’re serving static HTML files, proxying your own server, or even just copy/pasting the snippet into your code, you can benefit from this new feature. ‘app’ is the name of the application’s folder within the base folder in this instance, you may of course wish to amend this to your desired folder name. Follow the terminal instructions, giving your project a name, version, description etc.

But what if we don’t want to write stuff in, have to check the right version from the npm website, and then run npm install each time to actually pull it down? The latest version of gulp-ruby-sass will throw out an error if you use the code form this tutorial. Whereas Gruntfiles can often become very difficult to maintain and large, Gulp tries to avoid too much configuration and keep things simple.

In a similar way that you can split out Grunt configs into multiple files, Webpack allows you to separate your common , production, and development settings into distinct files. To achieve this, we can use the webpack-merge plugin – included in the starter kit. You can think of Bower as NuGet for the static third-party code that your web application requires. Rather than downloading packages from the web, including possibly resolving dependencies manually, it will take care of downloading everything we need for a particular package. NPM is a JavaScript package manager, and became the standard package manager for node.js a number of years ago. Gulp and Grunt are both task runners running on the node.js runtime, and their main functions are to pre-process and/or bundle our client side JavaScript and CSS. NPM, is the package manager that installs the other package managers discussed in this post, as they all run on node.js locally.

I’ve stuck my postcss.config.js and tsconfig.json in the root of the folder that holds all my projects so starting a project with Parcel should be far more straightforward next time. Run the Gulpfile by navigating to the root directory of your project and running the command gulp. This will run gulp default, which in our example is a task that runs gulp watch. Tasks that you would usually run on a regular basis from the command line or even run using a bash script, task runners handle all that for you. For instance you can use a task runner to lint your JavaScript files every time you change them, it’ll then let you know if you’ve done anything un-lint-worthy. Gulp.js is a task runner that is used to automate tasks such as compiling all your style sheets into a single file, uglifying your JavaScript and so much more.

Gulp Vs Grunt

I’m using VS 2015 Community Edition .I’m not able to Run Package Intellisense extension and Task Runner Explorer is not give option for installing in VS 2015 rather it gives for VS 2013. Can any you help me out with this problem and does it works to open an existing Grunt.js project into my VS. I’m totally new to Grunt.js. This gives you a persistent window that lists your available grunt tasks and lets you kick any one of them off with a double click, showing the results in an output window. You can get extra powers for yourself if you install the intellisense extension, which makes using grunt in Visual Studio much easier. Gruntjs is a JavaScript task runner; one of a few that exist, but only one of two to become mainstream – the other being Gulp.

Also, In a multi developer environment using Web Essentials as a compiler isn’t ideal as you have to check in generated CSS files normally ending up with unnecessary merge conflicts, which are a pain to resolve. It’s worth calling out that at some point you may want to export or ‘build’ whatever you are making to merely the essential files with no source maps what is gulp and grunt etc. It’s probable that if you copy the files from the `dist` folder ‘as is’ to another location that isn’t running the local host server, none of the assets, such as style sheets and scripts, will load. The first watcher will watch the SCSS directory (and it’s subdirectories) for changes in any file ending ending in .scss, then it will run the sass task.

By now, you must have noticed that comparing all three of these tools is like comparing apples, oranges, and bananas. However, recently, it has been observed that Gulp, webpack, and Grunt have become substitutes of each other. That is because there is a great overlap of tasks that all these what is gulp and grunt tools can perform. The most important distinction that we have already established between webpack vs Gulp is that the first one is what you call a module bundler, while the other one is a task runner. Perhaps tools like Browserify or Parcel would be more appropriate webpack alternatives.

Tasks are defined using a JavaScript function, and can have dependent tasks specified as an array of strings of existing fintech industry task names. If tasks are going to take a long time to run it can be good to split them up if we only want to run one.

By setting up a blank project, with all of the above configured out of the box, I can focus on the productivity and excitement of a new project, without getting bogged down in repetitive set up files. Bower is a package manager for client-side code, it was created by the team behind Bootstrap to give people a standard way of obtaining updates to it.

And there we have it, with the dev alias task bound to SolutionOpened, when we open the project our grunt task to watch SASS files will run. This example is with SASS but this applies to LESS and TypeScript too. Web Essentials has been a great accelerator in making these tools usable in Visual Studio, but the future is looking bright with Task Runner Explorer. By installing as a dev dependency a node_modules folder is created in the root of our project and each plugin is added to our package.json. Web Essentials brought us SASS compilation using LibSass (well node-sass, which binds to LibSass). The big wins were; no dependency on Ruby and integrated compilation with save and build actions. But it wasn’t without it’s problems, sometimes I found compiles failed for no apparent reason and only a good old Visual Studio restart would sort it out.

As JavaScript task runners, both Gulp and Grunt do a great job of minifying code, cleaning CSS, transforming template files and, well, just about anything you can imagine as a task that can be run during a build. Tasks run code from modules that are required by the gulpfile to do things such as cleaning out your build directory. You would do this by requiring the rimrafmodule and then calling it within a “clean” task, passing your build directory in as a parameter.

Most apps either only had a few lines of JS scripts, or were based on a collection of a fewer number of files. Loading and running the application was thus fairly simple and quick. How to use npm script hooks with grunt to trigger different build tasks based on process environment.

Author: France Marmousez