Remove Gulp as a dependency

[ericwbailey]

I love Gulp, but I love less external dependencies more. I initially used it for the redesign to get things up and running quickly.

The tasks we're using Gulp for are relatively straightforward, namely asset minification, concatenation, post-processing, and Browsersync. Because of this, there is an opportunity to do a lot of this via node scripts. Big-picture, I'd also like to lean more on Eleventy's capabilities to do the same—we're already using it for things like addPassthroughCopy.

To remove Gulp, we'd need to:

• [ ] Create node scripts for each Gulp task, and ensure feature parity.
• [ ] See what tasks can be used in Eleventy directly.
• [ ] Update npm run a11yproject to make sure it works.
• [ ] Update Netlify to reflect these changes.
• [ ] Remove references to Gulp in our documentation.
• [ ] Do a little happy dance.

[ericwbailey]

@esjay You had mentioned wanting to tackle this previously. How does this sound to you?

[esjay]

@esjay You had mentioned wanting to tackle this previously. How does this sound to you?

@ericwbailey put me in coach!

[ericwbailey]

Woo!

[esjay]

Due to a dependency upon how eleventy processes incremental builds, we can get about 95% of the way towards this, but the build output will suffer due to eleventy's need to rebuild the entire site whenever a passthrough file copy operation occurs. Currently, this is on eleventy's Incremental enhancement board/roadmap.

After discussing with @ericwbailey, we decided to pause existing work on this PR until something moves on the parallelized/incremental build front with eleventy.

[SaptakS]

The updates to eleventy's incremental usage in v2.x might make this possible now?

[ericwbailey]

Yes! Upgrading this site to use Eleventy 2 is on my list, and this should address that, exactly like what you said, @SaptakS.

@esjay: Is this something you'd be interested in pairing on?