Gulp.js

The gulp ecosystem includes more than 3500 such plugins. gulp is a build tool in JavaScript built on node streams. These streams facilitate the connection of file operations through pipelines. gulp reads the file system and pipes the data at hand from one single-purposed plugin to another through the .pipe() operator, doing one task at a time. The original files are not affected until all the plugins are processed. It can be configured either to modify the original files or to create new ones. This grants the ability to perform complex tasks through linking its numerous plugins. The users can also write their own plugins to define their own tasks. Unlike other task runners that run tasks by configuration, gulp requires knowledge of JavaScript and coding to define its tasks. gulp is a build system which means apart from running tasks, it is also capable of copying files from one location to another, compiling, deploying, creating notifications, unit testing, linting, etc. Task-runners like gulp and Grunt are built on Node.js rather than npm because the basic npm scripts are inefficient when executing multiple tasks. Even though some developers prefer npm scripts because they can be simple and easy to implement, there are numerous ways where gulp and Grunt seem to have an advantage over each other, and the default provided scripts.