Gulp - Overview

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What is Gulp?

Gulp is a task runner that uses Node.js as a platform. Gulp purely uses the JavaScript code and helps to run front-end tasks and large-scale web applications. It builds system automated tasks like CSS and HTML minification, concatenating library files, and compiling the SASS files. These tasks can be run using Shell or Bash scripts on the command line.

Why to use Gulp?

  • It is shorter, simpler and faster as compared to other task runner.
  • Uses SASS and LESS as CSS preprocessor.
  • Automatically refreshes page after editing the source files.
  • Easy to understand and build the Gulpfile.js because, it uses pure JavaScript code to build the task.

History

All the documentation of Gulp is covered by the CC0 license. Initially, Gulp v1.0.0 was released on January 15, 2015, and the current version of Gulp is v3.9.0.

Features

  • Provides minification and concatenation.
  • Uses pure JavaScript code.
  • Converts LESS or SASS to CSS compilation.
  • Manages file manipulation in the memory and enhances speed by using the Node.js platform.

Advantages

  • Huge speed advantage over any other task runner
  • Easy to code and understand.
  • Easy to test the web applications..
  • Plugins are simple to use and they are designed to do one thing at a time.
  • Performs repetitive tasks repeatedly such as minifying stylesheets, compressing images, etc.

Disadvantages

  • More number of dependencies and is a newcomer compared to Grunt.
  • Using Gulp plugins, you cannot perform multiple tasks.
  • Configuration is not as clean as Grunt.
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