Why use npm with laravel?

Question

As npm is the package manager for node, I frequently see it used with laravel boilerplate projects, but I can't reason why?

For example, this laravel-5-boilerplate instructs to npm install within the steps of installing the project..

Other examples too can be found of using npm with laravel..

Can someone please explain to me?

Solution 1

Blockquote

I made that boilerplate. That command is specific to download the dependencies for the Laravel Elixir package (http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/elixir) But has many, many uses outside that.

The Elixir docs explain it very well.

Solution 2

Nowadays npm containing general tools for work with various front-end tasks. So, it's very useful to grab some packages from it. In case of laravel, there is two utilities, that it uses:

gulp - streaming building tool for concatenating, minifing your css,js code.

laravel-elixir - is wrapper for gulp, written by Jeffrey Way, who is doing laracasts for us. It's place where you can found out more about this this tool in particular and in common.

If you will use only standart js/css, you can pass this step.

Comments

[Samir Sabri]

Thanks Anthony for explanation, so basically npm will install js packages? like we can find useful packages for angular js too?