Introducing the task runners

Applications are agreeably complex in nature. More and more logic is put into the browser and it is written with many lines of JavaScript code. The new CSS3 features and the improved performance of native browser animations lead to a lot of CSS code. Of course, at the end, we still want to keep the things separated. Make sure that everything is well-placed in different folders and files. Otherwise, our code will be difficult to maintain. We may need to generate manifest.json, use a preprocessor, or simply copy files from one location to another. Thankfully, there are instruments that make our life easier. The task runner accepts instructions and performs certain actions. It enables us to set a watcher and monitor files for changes. This is extremely helpful if we have a complex setup and a lot of aspects to handle.

At the moment, there are two popular task runners for Node.js: Grunt and Gulp. They are widely used because of the plugins written specifically for...