Gulp is an expressive, streaming build system which brings a terse, easy to use configuration setup we feel benefits those using front-end build tooling. We enjoy using it for speed and task composability. Although Grunt is a fantastic tool with a rich ecosystem of existing plugins, it comes with a level of (what some deem) over-configuration when it comes to simple tasks. The team working on Web Starter Kit continue to use and love both tools, but felt Gulp would be a better fit for the needs of our users in this particular case.

This is generally caused by permissions issues in your home directory. To reclaim ownership of the .npm directory, open up a terminal window and run sudo chown -R whoami ~/.npm. If this doesn't solve your permissions issues, you may find you also need permissions to write to the node_modules directory. Running sudo chown -R whoami /usr/local/lib/node_modules should address this.

During installation if you notice the following message appear in your terminal, your system may have experienced an issue installing some of our image optimization tools:

✗ pre-build test failed, compiling from source...
libpng-dev is installed

{ [Error: Command failed: In file included from pngquant.c:59:
./rwpng.h:35:10: fatal error: 'png.h' file not found
#include "png.h"    /* libpng header; includes zlib.h */
         ^
1 error generated.
make: *** [pngquant.o] Error 1
] killed: false, code: 2, signal: null }

This can usually be solved by going to the terminal and running npm cache clear. Next, re-install the Web Starter Kit tooling by running sudo npm install inside the root directory of the download (e.g /web-starter-kit). If you find that this doesn't solve the error and you are a Mac user, try installing Homebrew - a package manager for OSX, and then run brew install libpng.