EDedraferi·Dec 9, 2014
The author's argument is actually "NPM is a better build tool than Grunt or Gulp."
He followed up with an extensive tutorial on how to do complex builds with NPM [1]. The tutorial concludes with an example where NPM is used to:
* Take my JS and lint, test & compile it into 1 versioned file (with a separate sourcemap) and upload it to S3
* Compile Stylus into CSS, down to a single, versioned file (with separate sourcemap), upload it to S3
* Add watchers for testing and compilation
* Add a static file server to see my single page app in a web browser
* Add livereload for CSS and JS
* Have a task that combines all these files so I can type one command and spin up an environment
* For bonus points, open a browser window automagically pointing to my website
He accomplishes this with ~20 lines in the "script" object of package.json. The whole p
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rocess is initiated with a single npm run dev command. He asserts that "to do the equivalent in Grunt, it'd take a Gruntfile of a few hundred lines, plus (my finger in the air estimate) around 10 extra dependencies."
[1] http://blog.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build-tool...
[2] https://github.com/keithamus/npm-scripts-example