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.