What are npm, bower, gulp, Yeoman, and grunt good for?

Question

I\'m a backend developer, and slightly confused by npm, bower, gulp, grunt, and Yeoman. Whenever I ask someone what their purpose is, the answer tends to boil down to depend

Answer 1

So, Since you have a good idea what each is, I will give you a simple workflow.

1. I use yeoman to scaffold a basic skeleton.
2. I am using node as the runtime for my application. ie. run node appname
3. I use npm to install node modules for helping me write the application in node
4. I might need some component from bower like front-end libraries so use bower to fetch these.
5. Now to do some repetitive task I will use grunt or gulp to write some tasks. So everytime I want to repeat it, say minimify my js files I call grunt/gulp and make them do it. Difference you ask, Gulp is stream based while grunt is task based.
6. I do version control using git to keep track of changes