Why I Left Gulp and Grunt for npm Scripts

As a full-stack developer who has been building web applications for over a decade, I‘ve seen my fair share of build tools and task automation pipelines come and go. From the early days of hand-coded Ant XML files to the rise of Grunt and Gulp, the quest to make build processes more efficient and maintainable has been never-ending.

But after years of using Grunt and Gulp across dozens of projects, I recently found myself questioning if these abstractions were still providing value. The configuration files had grown increasingly complex, the plugin ecosystems felt stagnant, and debugging build issues required spelunking through multiple layers of obscure abstractions. Something wasn‘t right.

It turns out I‘m not alone in feeling this pain. In a recent survey of over 5,000 front-end developers, Gulp and Grunt were both among the most frequently cited tools developers were interested in dropping from their workflow.

Source: Front End Tooling Survey 2019

At the same time, npm has steadily grown to become the default choice for managing dependencies and scripts in JavaScript projects. With over 1.3 billion daily downloads and counting, npm‘s place at the center of the JavaScript ecosystem is more apparent than ever.

Source: npm Blog

So what happens if we ditch the abstractions entirely and embrace npm scripts as a complete build automation solution? That‘s exactly what I decided to find out. And after converting several large production applications to use npm scripts exclusively, I can confidently say I‘m never going back to Gulp or Grunt.

Embracing the Unix Philosophy

At its core, the shift to npm scripts is about embracing the "Unix philosophy": small, composable tools that do one thing well. Rather than installing a task runner and plugins for every bit of functionality, npm scripts allow us to compose the already-excellent CLI tools directly.

Consider a typical frontend build process that may involve the following steps:

1. Clean the output directory
2. Lint the source code
3. Transpile modern JavaScript to cross-browser compatible code
4. Bundle modules together and generate an output file
5. Minify the bundle for production
6. Run unit tests
7. Generate a code coverage report

With Gulp or Grunt, each of these steps would typically be handled by separate plugins, each with their own configuration options and syntaxes to learn. And if any part of the pipeline changes, like switching test frameworks or adding a new transpilation step, we‘re back to hunting for plugins and updating a complex configuration file.

Compare that to an npm scripts implementation leveraging the popular frontend build tools directly:

{
  "scripts": {
    "clean": "rimraf dist",
    "lint": "eslint src",
    "build:js": "babel src -d dist",
    "build:bundle": "webpack",
    "build:minify": "terser dist/bundle.js -o dist/bundle.min.js",
    "test": "jest",
    "test:coverage": "jest --coverage",
    "build": "npm run clean && npm run lint && npm run build:js && npm run build:bundle && npm run build:minify",
    "ci": "npm run build && npm run test:coverage"
  }
}

With this setup, every part of the build pipeline is handled by a focused, single-responsibility tool. There‘s no additional layers of abstraction, just direct calls to battle-tested CLI tools like ESLint, Babel, Webpack, Jest and Terser.

If we need to modify any step of the process, we can leverage the well-documented options and configuration files supported by the tools directly rather than hunting for a plugin or waiting for a plugin maintainer to expose the functionality we need.

Composability and Flexibility

Another major advantage of npm scripts is how easy it is to compose them together and modify the pipeline as needed. In the example above, the build script combines the output of 5 separate scripts into a full build pipeline. This makes it trivial to tweak the process for different environments or run only a subset of the pipeline.

For example, if we wanted to generate a development build without minification, it‘s as easy as running:

npm run build:js && npm run build:bundle

Or if we need to disable linting temporarily, we can comment out that line in the build script without having to touch any other code.

This composability becomes even more valuable when we consider more advanced techniques like generating multiple test coverage reports, only running certain tasks when files change, or parallelizing independent build steps. All of these scenarios are easily accomplished with the built-in features of npm scripts.

Consistency and Standards

Perhaps the biggest benefit of using npm scripts across all my projects is the consistency and standardization it provides. Rather than having to dig through custom Gulp or Grunt configurations to determine how to build, test and deploy an app, I can always expect a set of standard npm scripts to be available.

This makes jumping into a new project much easier and reduces the mental overhead of context switching between different build setups. It also makes cross-team collaboration more efficient. Back-end developers, DevOps engineers, and designers can all understand and use npm scripts without having to learn the intricacies of a particular task runner plugin ecosystem.

But consistency isn‘t just about having standardized script names. It‘s also about being able to depend on the behavior and output of the underlying tools regardless of which project you‘re working on. When you‘re calling tools like Babel, Webpack and Jest directly, you can have confidence that they‘ll work the same across all your projects. With Gulp and Grunt plugins, there‘s always the risk of a plugin falling out of maintenance or subtly changing behavior between versions.

Performance

You might be thinking that ditching task runners means sacrificing performance, particularly when it comes to complex build pipelines with lots of file I/O and potential for parallelization. But in my experience, npm scripts can be every bit as performant as Gulp or Grunt while often requiring significantly less configuration.

As an example, let‘s look at some benchmarks from the LibSass project, which provides a C++ implementation of the Sass CSS preprocessor. The LibSass team switched from Gulp to npm scripts in 2020 and saw some impressive performance gains:

Source: LibSass PR #2873

In the optimized npm scripts implementation, the build and test suite ran nearly 3 times faster than the original Gulp setup. Much of this improvement was due to the ability to run tasks in parallel without the additional overhead of Gulp‘s task orchestration.

But performance isn‘t just about speed. It‘s also about the cognitive overhead and time spent configuring, debugging and maintaining a complex build pipeline. And that‘s where I‘ve found npm scripts really shine. By eliminating the extra layers of abstraction and allowing developers to leverage standard CLI tools directly, npm scripts tend to result in build pipelines that are leaner, easier to understand and faster to troubleshoot when issues come up.

When To Use a Task Runner

With all that said, are there still cases where using a task runner like Grunt or Gulp makes sense? Absolutely.

For larger teams with complex, multi-stage build pipelines that need to be shared across many projects, investing the time to fully optimize a Gulp or Grunt setup may well be worth it. The "configuration as code" approach of task runners can provide a cleaner interface for describing complex build processes and make it easier to centrally manage and update them over time.

Task runners can also be valuable in situations where developers may not be as comfortable working with CLI tools or where the existing frontend infrastructure heavily depends on Gulp or Grunt plugins. Migrating an older codebase to npm scripts may require a more significant overhaul than is feasible, making a gradual transition more appealing.

Ultimately, the choice of build tools and automation approaches should be driven by the specific needs and constraints of your team and project. But for frontend applications using modern tooling and relatively straightforward build pipelines, I believe npm scripts provide a leaner, more flexible and more maintainable solution in most cases.

Getting Started

If you‘re interested in ditching your task runner and moving to npm scripts, the process is typically pretty straightforward:

1. Identify the specific tools needed for your build and test pipeline (e.g. Babel, Webpack, ESLint, Jest, etc.) and install them as devDependencies in your project.

2. Create npm scripts in your package.json for each discrete step of your build and test process. Take advantage of built-in CLI options and config files to handle common scenarios.

3. Compose the individual scripts together into composite scripts for common workflows like dev builds, production builds, and CI test runs. Use pre and post hooks to run setup and cleanup tasks.

4. Use tools like npm-run-all, onchange and concurrently to handle more advanced scenarios like parallelization, watch modes and platform-specific tasks.

5. Continuously refactor and simplify your npm scripts as you identify opportunities to DRY up common patterns or use more specialized tools.

There are also some great resources available for diving deeper into npm scripts techniques and best practices:

• Why npm Scripts? by CSS Tricks
• Helpers and tips for npm run scripts by Michael Kühnel
• Advanced front-end automation with npm scripts by Kate Hudson
• How to Use npm as a Build Tool by Keith Cirkel

I‘ve also found studying the npm scripts of popular open source projects to be incredibly helpful. Projects like Preact, Svelte and Babel are great examples of npm scripts in action.

Conclusion

After years of using Gulp and Grunt across a wide variety of frontend projects, I‘ve found npm scripts to be a simpler, more flexible and more maintainable solution for build automation. By leveraging the power of the command line and composing specialized tools together, it‘s possible to create build pipelines that are faster, easier to understand and more portable across teams and projects.

If you‘re currently relying on a task runner like Gulp or Grunt, I encourage you to explore npm scripts as an alternative. Especially for modern frontend applications with relatively straightforward build requirements, you may find that dropping the extra abstractions leads to a leaner, more efficient and more enjoyable dev experience.

Transitioning to npm scripts has been a real productivity boost for me personally, and I believe many other developers and teams could benefit from a similar shift. While there will always be a place for specialized task runners in certain situations, the momentum behind npm scripts as a general build automation solution shows no signs of slowing. Will you make the jump?