Last month I noted my opinions on why we should stop using Grunt, Gulp et al. I suggested we should start using npm instead. npm's scripts directive can do everything that these build tools can, more succinctly, more elegantly, with less package dependencies and less maintainence overhead. The first draft of the original post was way over 6,000 words - because it went in depth into how npm could be used as an alternative, but I removed it for brevity - and because the point of that post was me expressing opinions, not a tutorial post. However, the response was pretty overwhelming - many people replied telling me that these build tools offers them features that npm cannot (or does not), some developers were brazen enough to present me with a Gruntfile and say "how could this be done in npm?!". I thought I'd pull out how-tos from the original draft and make a new post, just focussing on how to do these common tasks with npm.

npm is a fantastic tool that offers much more than meets the eye. It has become the backbone of the Node.js community - many, including me, use it pretty much every day. In fact, looking at my Bash History (well, Fish history) npm is second only to git as my most used command. Still, I find new features in npm every day (and of course, new ones are still being developed!). Most of these aim at making npm a great package manager, but npm has a great subset of functionality decidated to running tasks to facilitate in a packages lifecycle - in other words, it is a great tool for build scripts.

Welcome! Pancake is built on a simple idea — to publish static sites easily, whether from your Dropbox account or from a git repository.

We use git at Bump for all sorts of things. Recently, we've started converting our designers and product managers. You can think about git like Dropbox: it takes files on your computer, puts them in the cloud, and lets other people work on them too. But it has some pretty rocking advantages.

Dropbox is a free file synchronization/backup service where you can backup, save and share files. One of the best things is, that you can use it as git remote server.