Reputation: 735
I feel comfortable using Gulp for compiling scss, minifying it, minifying and concatenating scripts etc. For installing vendor libraries bower seems really nice to me due to its flat dependency tree. But when I install Gulp locally with
npm install gulp
it creates a node_modules
folder with lots of different libs except Gulp itself. So I it comes to that I don't actually need bower and I may use these libs. But I really don't like npm's complicated dependency tree. Perhaps, I could somehow install only Gulp itself and use just bower for dependencies?
And what about package.json
and bower.json
? Do I really need both of them in the project or maybe they duplicate one another's functions? In general, I'm feeling a bit of confused with how to use bower and gulp together. Maybe someone could clarify those moments to me?
Upvotes: 0
Views: 163
Reputation: 6532
Gulp is an automated build tool you get with nodejs's package manager npm, it's used to run tasks such as concatenating, compiling sass, etc.
Bower is a dependency management tool whereby it fetches libraries, and their dependencies for your project. It does nothing but dependency management.
An example of how the two are used together would be fetching bootstrap and jquery with bower, then using gulp to copy the relevant scripts (jquery.js &bootstrap.js) to your websites assets folder.
Basically you'd use bower to fetch a library, such as jquery, then you'd use gulp to minify your jquery code.
A final example would, you use bower to fetch jquery, bootstrap, and say angularjs, you then use gulp to concatenate them into one file 'vendor.js', to save http requests in your app.
Hope those examples shine some light on how the two are used together.
Upvotes: 1