NPM vs. Bower vs. Browserify vs. Gulp vs. Grunt vs. Webpack [closed]

Question

I'm trying to summarize my knowledge about the most popular JavaScript package managers, bundlers, and task runners. Please correct me if I'm wrong:

• npm & bower are package managers. They just download the dependencies and don't know how to build projects on their own. What they know is to call webpack/gulp/grunt after fetching all the dependencies.
• bower is like npm, but builds a flattened dependency trees (unlike npm which does it recursively). Meaning npm fetches the dependencies for each dependency (may fetch the same a few times), while bower expects you to manually include sub-dependencies. Sometimes bower and npm are used together for front-end and back-end respectively (since each megabyte might matter in front-end).
• grunt and gulp are task runners to automate everything that can be automated (i.e. compile CSS/Sass, optimize images, make a bundle and minify/transpile it).
• grunt vs. gulp (is like maven vs. gradle or configuration vs. code). Grunt is based on configuring separate independent tasks, each task opens/handles/closes file. Gulp requires less amount of code and is based on Node streams, which allows it to build pipe chains (without reopening the same file) and makes it faster.
• webpack (webpack-dev-server) - for me it's a task runner with hot reloading of changes which allows you to forget about all JS/CSS watchers.
• npm/bower + plugins may replace task runners. Their abilities often intersect so there are different implications if you need to use gulp/grunt over npm + plugins. But task runners are definitely better for complex tasks (e.g. "on each build create bundle, transpile from ES6 to ES5, run it at all browsers emulators, make screenshots and deploy to dropbox through ftp").
• browserify allows packaging node modules for browsers. browserify vs node's require is actually AMD vs CommonJS.

Questions:

1. What is webpack & webpack-dev-server? Official documentation says it's a module bundler but for me it's just a task runner. What's the difference?
2. Where would you use browserify? Can't we do the same with node/ES6 imports?
3. When would you use gulp/grunt over npm + plugins?
4. Please provide examples when you need to use a combination

Answer 1

Webpack and Browserify

Webpack and Browserify do pretty much the same job, which is processing your code to be used in a target environment (mainly browser, though you can target other environments like Node). Result of such processing is one or more bundles - assembled scripts suitable for targeted environment.

For example, let's say you wrote ES6 code divided into modules and want to be able to run it in a browser. If those modules are Node modules, the browser won't understand them since they exist only in the Node environment. ES6 modules also won't work in older browsers like IE11. Moreover, you might have used experimental language features (ES next proposals) that browsers don't implement yet so running such script would just throw errors. Tools like Webpack and Browserify solve these problems by translating such code to a form a browser is able to execute. On top of that, they make it possible to apply a huge variety of optimisations on those bundles.

However, Webpack and Browserify differ in many ways, Webpack offers many tools by default (e.g. code splitting), while Browserify can do this only after downloading plugins but using both leads to very similar results. It comes down to personal preference (Webpack is trendier). Btw, Webpack is not a task runner, it is just processor of your files (it processes them by so called loaders and plugins) and it can be run (among other ways) by a task runner.

---

Webpack Dev Server

Webpack Dev Server provides a similar solution to Browsersync - a development server where you can deploy your app rapidly as you are working on it, and verify your development progress immediately, with the dev server automatically refreshing the browser on code changes or even propagating changed code to browser without reloading with so called hot module replacement.

---

Task runners vs NPM scripts

I've been using Gulp for its conciseness and easy task writing, but have later found out I need neither Gulp nor Grunt at all. Everything I have ever needed could have been done using NPM scripts to run 3rd-party tools through their API. Choosing between Gulp, Grunt or NPM scripts depends on taste and experience of your team.

While tasks in Gulp or Grunt are easy to read even for people not so familiar with JS, it is yet another tool to require and learn and I personally prefer to narrow my dependencies and make things simple. On the other hand, replacing these tasks with the combination of NPM scripts and (propably JS) scripts which run those 3rd party tools (eg. Node script configuring and running rimraf for cleaning purposes) might be more challenging. But in the majority of cases, those three are equal in terms of their results.

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Examples

As for the examples, I suggest you have a look at this React starter project, which shows you a nice combination of NPM and JS scripts covering the whole build and deploy process. You can find those NPM scripts in package.json in the root folder, in a property named scripts. There you will mostly encounter commands like babel-node tools/run start. Babel-node is a CLI tool (not meant for production use), which at first compiles ES6 file tools/run (run.js file located in tools) - basically a runner utility. This runner takes a function as an argument and executes it, which in this case is start - another utility (start.js) responsible for bundling source files (both client and server) and starting the application and development server (the dev server will be probably either Webpack Dev Server or Browsersync).

Speaking more precisely, start.js creates both client and server side bundles, starts an express server and after a successful launch initializes Browser-sync, which at the time of writing looked like this (please refer to react starter project for the newest code).

const bs = Browsersync.create();  
bs.init({
      ...(DEBUG ? {} : { notify: false, ui: false }),

      proxy: {
        target: host,
        middleware: [wpMiddleware, ...hotMiddlewares],
      },

      // no need to watch '*.js' here, webpack will take care of it for us,
      // including full page reloads if HMR won't work
      files: ['build/content/**/*.*'],
}, resolve)

The important part is proxy.target, where they set server address they want to proxy, which could be http://localhost:3000, and Browsersync starts a server listening on http://localhost:3001, where the generated assets are served with automatic change detection and hot module replacement. As you can see, there is another configuration property files with individual files or patterns Browser-sync watches for changes and reloads the browser if some occur, but as the comment says, Webpack takes care of watching js sources by itself with HMR, so they cooperate there.

Now I don't have any equivalent example of such Grunt or Gulp configuration, but with Gulp (and somewhat similarly with Grunt) you would write individual tasks in gulpfile.js like

gulp.task('bundle', function() {
  // bundling source files with some gulp plugins like gulp-webpack maybe
});

gulp.task('start', function() {
  // starting server and stuff
});

where you would be doing essentially pretty much the same things as in the starter-kit, this time with task runner, which solves some problems for you, but presents its own issues and some difficulties during learning the usage, and as I say, the more dependencies you have, the more can go wrong. And that is the reason I like to get rid of such tools.

Answer 2

Update October 2018

If you are still uncertain about Front-end dev, you can take a quick look into an excellent resource here.

https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

Update June 2018

Learning modern JavaScript is tough if you haven’t been there since the beginning. If you are the newcomer, remember to check this excellent written to have a better overview.

https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-explained-for-dinosaurs-f695e9747b70

Update July 2017

Recently I found a comprehensive guide from Grab team about how to approach front-end development in 2017. You can check it out as below.

https://github.com/grab/front-end-guide

---

I've been also searching for this quite some time since there are a lot of tools out there and each of them benefits us in a different aspect. The community is divided across tools like Browserify, Webpack, jspm, Grunt and Gulp. You might also hear about Yeoman or Slush. That’s not a problem, it’s just confusing for everyone trying to understand a clear path forward.

Anyway, I would like to contribute something.

Table Of Contents

• Table Of Content
• 1. Package Manager
  • NPM
  • Bower
  • Difference between Bower and NPM
  • Yarn
  • jspm
• 2. Module Loader/Bundling
  • RequireJS
  • Browserify
  • Webpack
  • SystemJS
• 3. Task runner
  • Grunt
  • Gulp
• 4. Scaffolding tools
  • Slush and Yeoman

---

1. Package Manager

Package managers simplify installing and updating project dependencies, which are libraries such as: jQuery, Bootstrap, etc - everything that is used on your site and isn't written by you.

Browsing all the library websites, downloading and unpacking the archives, copying files into the projects — all of this is replaced with a few commands in the terminal.

NPM

It stands for: Node JS package manager helps you to manage all the libraries your software relies on. You would define your needs in a file called package.json and run npm install in the command line... then BANG, your packages are downloaded and ready to use. It could be used both for front-end and back-end libraries.

Bower

For front-end package management, the concept is the same with NPM. All your libraries are stored in a file named bower.json and then run bower install in the command line.

Bower is recommended their user to migrate over to npm or yarn. Please be careful

Difference between Bower and NPM

The biggest difference between Bower and NPM is that NPM does nested dependency tree while Bower requires a flat dependency tree as below.

Quoting from What is the difference between Bower and npm?

NPM

project root
[node_modules] // default directory for dependencies
 -> dependency A
 -> dependency B
    [node_modules]
    -> dependency A

 -> dependency C
    [node_modules]
    -> dependency B
      [node_modules]
       -> dependency A
    -> dependency D

Bower

project root
[bower_components] // default directory for dependencies
 -> dependency A
 -> dependency B // needs A
 -> dependency C // needs B and D
 -> dependency D

There are some updates on npm 3 Duplication and Deduplication, please open the doc for more detail.

Yarn

A new package manager for JavaScript published by Facebook recently with some more advantages compared to NPM. And with Yarn, you still can use both NPMand Bower registry to fetch the package. If you've installed a package before, yarn creates a cached copy which facilitates offline package installs.

jspm

JSPM is a package manager for the SystemJS universal module loader, built on top of the dynamic ES6 module loader. It is not an entirely new package manager with its own set of rules, rather it works on top of existing package sources. Out of the box, it works with GitHub and npm. As most of the Bower based packages are based on GitHub, we can install those packages using jspm as well. It has a registry that lists most of the commonly used front-end packages for easier installation.

See the different between Bower and jspm: Package Manager: Bower vs jspm

---

2. Module Loader/Bundling

Most projects of any scale will have their code split between several files. You can just include each file with an individual <script> tag, however, <script> establishes a new HTTP connection, and for small files – which is a goal of modularity – the time to set up the connection can take significantly longer than transferring the data. While the scripts are downloading, no content can be changed on the page.

• The problem of download time can largely be solved by concatenating a group of simple modules into a single file and minifying it.

E.g

<head>
    <title>Wagon</title>
    <script src=“build/wagon-bundle.js”></script>
</head>

• The performance comes at the expense of flexibility though. If your modules have inter-dependency, this lack of flexibility may be a showstopper.

E.g

<head>
    <title>Skateboard</title>
    <script src=“connectors/axle.js”></script>
    <script src=“frames/board.js”></script>
    <!-- skateboard-wheel and ball-bearing both depend on abstract-rolling-thing -->
    <script src=“rolling-things/abstract-rolling-thing.js”></script>
    <script src=“rolling-things/wheels/skateboard-wheel.js”></script>
    <!-- but if skateboard-wheel also depends on ball-bearing -->
    <!-- then having this script tag here could cause a problem -->
    <script src=“rolling-things/ball-bearing.js”></script>
    <!-- connect wheels to axle and axle to frame -->
    <script src=“vehicles/skateboard/our-sk8bd-init.js”></script>
</head>

Computers can do that better than you can, and that is why you should use a tool to automatically bundle everything into a single file.

Then we heard about RequireJS, Browserify, Webpack and SystemJS

RequireJS

It is a JavaScript file and module loader. It is optimized for in-browser use, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Node.

E.g: myModule.js

// package/lib is a dependency we require
define(["package/lib"], function (lib) {
  // behavior for our module
  function foo() {
    lib.log("hello world!");
  }

  // export (expose) foo to other modules as foobar
  return {
    foobar: foo,
  };
});

In main.js, we can import myModule.js as a dependency and use it.

require(["package/myModule"], function(myModule) {
    myModule.foobar();
});

And then in our HTML, we can refer to use with RequireJS.

<script src=“app/require.js” data-main=“main.js” ></script>

Read more about CommonJS and AMD to get understanding easily. Relation between CommonJS, AMD and RequireJS?

Browserify

Set out to allow the use of CommonJS formatted modules in the browser. Consequently, Browserify isn’t as much a module loader as a module bundler: Browserify is entirely a build-time tool, producing a bundle of code that can then be loaded client-side.

Start with a build machine that has node & npm installed, and get the package:

npm install -g –save-dev browserify

Write your modules in CommonJS format

//entry-point.js
var foo = require("../foo.js");
console.log(foo(4));

And when happy, issue the command to bundle:

browserify entry-point.js -o bundle-name.js

Browserify recursively finds all dependencies of entry-point and assembles them into a single file:

<script src="”bundle-name.js”"></script>

Webpack

It bundles all of your static assets, including JavaScript, images, CSS, and more, into a single file. It also enables you to process the files through different types of loaders. You could write your JavaScript with CommonJS or AMD modules syntax. It attacks the build problem in a fundamentally more integrated and opinionated manner. In Browserify you use Gulp/Grunt and a long list of transforms and plugins to get the job done. Webpack offers enough power out of the box that you typically don’t need Grunt or Gulp at all.

Basic usage is beyond simple. Install Webpack like Browserify:

npm install -g –save-dev webpack

And pass the command an entry point and an output file:

webpack ./entry-point.js bundle-name.js

SystemJS

It is a module loader that can import modules at run time in any of the popular formats used today (CommonJS, UMD, AMD, ES6). It is built on top of the ES6 module loader polyfill and is smart enough to detect the format being used and handle it appropriately. SystemJS can also transpile ES6 code (with Babel or Traceur) or other languages such as TypeScript and CoffeeScript using plugins.

Want to know what is the node module and why it is not well adapted to in-browser.

More useful article:

• https://medium.com/@housecor/browserify-vs-webpack-b3d7ca08a0a9#.c1q7ao3h4
• http://jamesknelson.com/which-build-system-should-i-use-for-my-javascript-app/
• https://appendto.com/2016/06/the-short-history-of-javascript-module-loaders/

---

Why jspm and SystemJS?

One of the main goals of ES6 modularity is to make it really simple to install and use any Javascript library from anywhere on the Internet (Github, npm, etc.). Only two things are needed:

• A single command to install the library
• One single line of code to import the library and use it

So with jspm, you can do it.

1. Install the library with a command: jspm install jquery
2. Import the library with a single line of code, no need to external reference inside your HTML file.

display.js

var $ = require('jquery');

$('body').append("I've imported jQuery!");

3. Then you configure these things within System.config({ ... }) before importing your module. Normally when run jspm init, there will be a file named config.js for this purpose.

4. To make these scripts run, we need to load system.js and config.js on the HTML page. After that, we will load the display.js file using the SystemJS module loader.

index.html

<script src="jspm_packages/system.js"></script>
<script src="config.js"></script>
<script>
  System.import("scripts/display.js");
</script>

Noted: You can also use npm with Webpack as Angular 2 has applied it. Since jspm was developed to integrate with SystemJS and it works on top of the existing npm source, so your answer is up to you.

---

3. Task runner

Task runners and build tools are primarily command-line tools. Why we need to use them: In one word: automation. The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting which previously cost us a lot of times to do with command line or even manually.

Grunt

You can create automation for your development environment to pre-process codes or create build scripts with a config file and it seems very difficult to handle a complex task. Popular in the last few years.

Every task in Grunt is an array of different plugin configurations, that simply get executed one after another, in a strictly independent, and sequential fashion.

grunt.initConfig({
    clean: {
    src: ['build/app.js', 'build/vendor.js']
    },

    copy: {
    files: [{
        src: 'build/app.js',
        dest: 'build/dist/app.js'
    }]
    }

    concat: {
    'build/app.js': ['build/vendors.js', 'build/app.js']
    }

    // ... other task configurations ...

});

grunt.registerTask('build', ['clean', 'bower', 'browserify', 'concat', 'copy']);

Gulp

Automation just like Grunt but instead of configurations, you can write JavaScript with streams like it's a node application. Prefer these days.

This is a Gulp sample task declaration.

//import the necessary gulp plugins
var gulp = require("gulp");
var sass = require("gulp-sass");
var minifyCss = require("gulp-minify-css");
var rename = require("gulp-rename");

//declare the task
gulp.task("sass", function (done) {
  gulp
    .src("./scss/ionic.app.scss")
    .pipe(sass())
    .pipe(gulp.dest("./www/css/"))
    .pipe(
      minifyCss({
        keepSpecialComments: 0,
      })
    )
    .pipe(rename({ extname: ".min.css" }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest("./www/css/"))
    .on("end", done);
});

See more: https://preslav.me/2015/01/06/gulp-vs-grunt-why-one-why-the-other/

---

4. Scaffolding tools

Slush and Yeoman

You can create starter projects with them. For example, you are planning to build a prototype with HTML and SCSS, then instead of manually create some folder like scss, css, img, fonts. You can just install yeoman and run a simple script. Then everything here for you.

Find more here.

npm install -g yo
npm install --global generator-h5bp
yo h5bp

See more: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-differences-between-NPM-Bower-Grunt-Gulp-Webpack-Browserify-Slush-Yeoman-and-Express

---

My answer is not matched with the content of the question but when I'm searching for this knowledge on Google, I always see the question on top so that I decided to answer it in summary.

Answer 3

OK, they all have got some similarities, they do the same things for you in different and similar ways, I divide them in 3 main groups as below:

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1) Module bundlers

webpack and browserify as popular ones, work like task runners but with more flexibility, aslo it will bundle everything together as your setting, so you can point to the result as bundle.js for example in one single file including the CSS and Javascript, for more details of each, look at the details below:

webpack

webpack is a module bundler for modern JavaScript applications. When webpack processes your application, it recursively builds a dependency graph that includes every module your application needs, then packages all of those modules into a small number of bundles - often only one - to be loaded by the browser.

It is incredibly configurable, but to get started you only need to understand Four Core Concepts: entry, output, loaders, and plugins.

This document is intended to give a high-level overview of these concepts, while providing links to detailed concept specific use-cases.

more here

browserify

Browserify is a development tool that allows us to write node.js-style modules that compile for use in the browser. Just like node, we write our modules in separate files, exporting external methods and properties using the module.exports and exports variables. We can even require other modules using the require function, and if we omit the relative path it’ll resolve to the module in the node_modules directory.

more here

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2) Task runners

gulp and grunt are task runners, basically what they do, creating tasks and run them whenever you want, for example you install a plugin to minify your CSS and then run it each time to do minifying, more details about each:

gulp

gulp.js is an open-source JavaScript toolkit by Fractal Innovations and the open source community at GitHub, used as a streaming build system in front-end web development. It is a task runner built on Node.js and Node Package Manager (npm), used for automation of time-consuming and repetitive tasks involved in web development like minification, concatenation, cache busting, unit testing, linting, optimization etc. gulp uses a code-over-configuration approach to define its tasks and relies on its small, single-purposed plugins to carry them out. gulp ecosystem has 1000+ such plugins made available to choose from.

more here

grunt

Grunt is a JavaScript task runner, a tool used to automatically perform frequently used tasks such as minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc. It uses a command-line interface to run custom tasks defined in a file (known as a Gruntfile). Grunt was created by Ben Alman and is written in Node.js. It is distributed via npm. Presently, there are more than five thousand plugins available in the Grunt ecosystem.

more here

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3) Package managers

package managers, what they do is managing plugins you need in your application and install them for you through github etc using package.json, very handy to update you modules, install them and sharing your app across, more details for each:

npm

npm is a package manager for the JavaScript programming language. It is the default package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js. It consists of a command line client, also called npm, and an online database of public packages, called the npm registry. The registry is accessed via the client, and the available packages can be browsed and searched via the npm website.

more here

bower

Bower can manage components that contain HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fonts or even image files. Bower doesn’t concatenate or minify code or do anything else - it just installs the right versions of the packages you need and their dependencies. To get started, Bower works by fetching and installing packages from all over, taking care of hunting, finding, downloading, and saving the stuff you’re looking for. Bower keeps track of these packages in a manifest file, bower.json.

more here

and the most recent package manager that shouldn't be missed, it's young and fast in real work environment compare to npm which I was mostly using before, for reinstalling modules, it do double checks the node_modules folder to check the existence of the module, also seems installing the modules takes less time:

yarn

Yarn is a package manager for your code. It allows you to use and share code with other developers from around the world. Yarn does this quickly, securely, and reliably so you don’t ever have to worry.

Yarn allows you to use other developers’ solutions to different problems, making it easier for you to develop your software. If you have problems, you can report issues or contribute back, and when the problem is fixed, you can use Yarn to keep it all up to date.

Code is shared through something called a package (sometimes referred to as a module). A package contains all the code being shared as well as a package.json file which describes the package.

more here

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Answer 4

You can find some technical comparison on npmcompare

Comparing browserify vs. grunt vs. gulp vs. webpack

As you can see webpack is very well maintained with a new version coming out every 4 days on average. But Gulp seems to have the biggest community of them all (with over 20K stars on Github) Grunt seems a bit neglected (compared to the others)

So if need to choose one over the other i would go with Gulp

Answer 5

What is webpack & webpack-dev-server? Official documentation says it's a module bundler but for me it's just a task runner. What's the difference?

webpack-dev-server is a live reloading web server that Webpack developers use to get immediate feedback what they do. It should only be used during development.

This project is heavily inspired by the nof5 unit test tool.

Webpack as the name implies will create a SINGLE package for the web. The package will be minimized, and combined into a single file (we still live in HTTP 1.1 age). Webpack does the magic of combining the resources (JavaScript, CSS, images) and injecting them like this: <script src="assets/bundle.js"></script>.

It can also be called module bundler because it must understand module dependencies, and how to grab the dependencies and to bundle them together.

Where would you use browserify? Can't we do the same with node/ES6 imports?

You could use Browserify on the exact same tasks where you would use Webpack. – Webpack is more compact, though.

Note that the ES6 module loader features in Webpack2 are using System.import, which not a single browser supports natively.

When would you use gulp/grunt over npm + plugins?

You can forget Gulp, Grunt, Brokoli, Brunch and Bower. Directly use npm command line scripts instead and you can eliminate extra packages like these here for Gulp:

var gulp        = require('gulp'),
  minifyCSS     = require('gulp-minify-css'),
  sass          = require('gulp-sass'),
  browserify    = require('gulp-browserify'),
  uglify        = require('gulp-uglify'),
  rename        = require('gulp-rename'),
  jshint        = require('gulp-jshint'),
  jshintStyle   = require('jshint-stylish'),
  replace       = require('gulp-replace'),
  notify        = require('gulp-notify'),

You can probably use Gulp and Grunt config file generators when creating config files for your project. This way you don't need to install Yeoman or similar tools.

Answer 6

Webpack is a bundler. Like Browserfy it looks in the codebase for module requests (require or import) and resolves them recursively. What is more, you can configure Webpack to resolve not just JavaScript-like modules, but CSS, images, HTML, literally everything. What especially makes me excited about Webpack, you can combine both compiled and dynamically loaded modules in the same app. Thus one get a real performance boost, especially over HTTP/1.x. How exactly you you do it I described with examples here http://dsheiko.com/weblog/state-of-javascript-modules-2017/ As an alternative for bundler one can think of Rollup.js (https://rollupjs.org/), which optimizes the code during compilation, but stripping all the found unused chunks.

For AMD, instead of RequireJS one can go with native ES2016 module system, but loaded with System.js (https://github.com/systemjs/systemjs)

Besides, I would point that npm is often used as an automating tool like grunt or gulp. Check out https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/scripts. I personally go now with npm scripts only avoiding other automation tools, though in past I was very much into grunt. With other tools you have to rely on countless plugins for packages, that often are not good written and not being actively maintained. npm knows its packages, so you call to any of locally installed packages by name like:

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "npm http-server"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "http-server": "^0.10.0"
  }
}

Actually you as a rule do not need any plugin if the package supports CLI.

Answer 7

Yarn is a recent package manager that probably deserves to be mentioned.
So, here it is: https://yarnpkg.com/

As far as I know it can fetch both npm and bower dependencies and has other appreciated features.