How Do You Install and Configure Gulp?

Problem scenario
You want to use Gulp the automation tool (https://gulpjs.com/).  How do you install it and get it to work on Linux (either a Debian distribution or a Red Hat distribution)?

Solution
1.  If you are using CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or Fedora, run these two commands:

sudo yum -y install nodejs npm  # *
sudo npm install -g gulp

If you are using Debian or Ubuntu Linux, run this command:  sudo apt-get -y install nodejs npm gulp  # *

* If you need assistance installing Node.js and npm on a different distribution of Linux, see this posting.

2.a. Run this commmand:  sudo npm init

2.b.  # Respond with whatever you think is best.  You can press enter to these six prompts:

name: (jdoe)
version: (1.0.0)
git repository:
keywords:
author:
license:

2.c.  For the "Is this ok?" prompt, choose "yes".

3  Run this command:  sudo npm install --save-dev gulp

4.  Create a file called Gulpfile.js with this as the content (the top line starts with "var gulp..."):

var gulp = require('gulp');
gulp.task('default', function() {
  // place code for your default task here
});

5.  Run the command: gulp

You should see this:

[12:46:49] Using gulpfile ~/Gulpfile.js
[12:46:49] Starting 'default'...
[12:46:49] Finished 'default' after 125 µs

6.  You can use this command to see what version of Gulp is installed:  gulp -v

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