Learning Gulp: Getting started with the Front End Factory

Gulp is an automatic task runner, or build system, written in node.js and can handle many workflow tasks. In his git-book, David Nowinsky described Gulp as a factory. I really like this description. Gulp, much like a factory, takes files and turns them into other files. You might question why this is needed, and to some it might not be. If you’re working on a simple site written in pure CSS, then it most likely not needed. However, if you’re doing a lot of mundane tasks, you could benefit from using Gulp. Build systems can watch files for changes, compile to CSS or Javascript, upload files to servers, optimize images, concatenate, minify, and much more.