# Build tools

Automate painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something using Gulp

## Requirements

There are a couple of things you need to make sure are set up on your machine before running the commands in your terminal.

### Node.js

In order to use our build tools you will need to download and install Node.js. If you do not have Node.js installed already, you can get it by downloading the package installer from the official website. Please download the stable version of Node.js (LTS).

Download Node.js

### Gulp CLI

After Node is installed on your system you can now proceed to Gulp installation. To do that simply run the command below in your terminal. This will install Gulp globally.

    npm install gulp-cli -g

## Package management

Now open the terminal and `cd` ro your project’s root. Once the path of your workflow is changed you have to install all the packages needed. You can do this with NPM or Yarn.

    npm install

## Gulp

Gulp is a toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something.

### Commands

For development we set a Gulp command that will compile the sources to dist then start a local Browsersync instance on port 3000 to serve and auto-refresh your pages as you edit.

    gulp

If you install new libraries, make sure you run the following command to sync your libs with the existing ones:

    gulp libs

For production we set a Gulp command that will compile and minify the CSS and JS files ready to be included in your project

    gulp build