Task Runners

A task runner is an automated way of performing tasks over and over again.

Common software development tasks include

• running test suites
• Compiling sass and or Javascript etc files
• starting a web server
• starting a worker ( can send out notifications or emails)
• starting a watcher (to watch for errors in the code)

Popular Task runners

• Gulp
• Grunt

These are especially good for complex projects.

• NPM

Is quick to set up and is perhaps the most popular out of the three.

NPM tasks are called scripts which are added to the scripts property in a package.json file

"scripts" : {
             "<name>" : "<command>"
             ...
            },

Tests are nested inside the scripts property and are given a name and command. This is executed in the command line when the task is run.

Types of NPM tasks

• Built in

these tasks do not require the run command. An example of this is test. So

npm run test

can also be ran as

npm test

• Arbitrary

These are custom task that you've named yourself which require NPMs run command