This article is more of a necessity than a detailed guide on Node, Gulp, Bower, and NPM. The next few articles will touch on layout and front-end workflows, and lately, I’ve been increasingly using these tools to simplify and optimize the development process.
Brief overview:
Gulp — a project build tool written in Node.js
Bower — a package manager for web frontend, also built on Node.js
Node.js — a platform based on the V8 engine (which translates JavaScript into machine code)
NPM — the package manager for Node.js (Gulp and Bower are installed as its packages)
So, what do we ultimately need? — a working installation of Gulp and Bower. These will help us boost our productivity in web development.
To do this, we need to install Node.js and NPM. Let’s go.
Installation
Install NodeJs:
$ sudo apt-get install nodejs
Install the NPM package manager:
$ sudo apt-get install npm
Not sure how it works on Windows, but on Ubuntu it’s super easy 🙂 No need to download anything manually. Just enter the command, and voilà — it’s ready.