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noir_lord
Good article, I got so annoyed with all the churn in build tools for client side I eschewed them all and just use Python with Envoy to run them as command line tools.

NPM brings in the packages and I use browserify for handling require but again from the cli not via grunt/gulp

It gives me near endless flexibility, the python code is often clearer and I can pull in just about anything I need if I need it.

    ./front.py js --debug
    ./front.py css --debug
    ./front.py deploy
I also like that the python code to handle tasks is largely self-documenting if you know python.

Since they are just python files I can setup filewatchers in intellij and call them when something changes giving me a high degree of automation.

mindrun
Awesome idea! Thank you for sharing it :) Haven't worked with Python so far, but it looks pretty straightforward.
noir_lord
For that kind of stuff it really is straightforward, Python is a pretty orthogonal language and it has lovely tooling.

If you do go that route look into using virtualenv and pip which allows you to 'freeze' requirements into a requirements.txt file.

Then on deploy you can just

    pip install -r requirements
Which allows you to install python stuff locally without messing up your global space (it's pretty similar to npm and composer over in PHP land).