[MAINTENANCE] Evaluate Replacement for Gulp in UI Builds

[adambuttrick]

Current State/Issue

The EZID front-end build pipeline relies on Gulp for tasks including:

• SCSS compilation (with sourcemaps and PostCSS processing)
• JavaScript linting, bundling, and minification
• Image optimization and caching
• File inclusion for HTML (e.g., <!--#include file="header.html"-->)
• Starting a development server with live reload and SSI (via browsersync)
• Running tasks such as cleaning directories, copying assets, and deploying to GitHub Pages

There are some challenges with this approach, specifically:

1. Gulp dependencies not being actively maintained
2. The UI and other CDL teams appear to have switched to other/more modern tooling alternatives

Desired State/Solution

Investigate migrating the build pipeline from Gulp to a more modern system, such as NPM scripts or a similar service, identify any package gaps or where custom build scripts would be necessary.

Tasks

• Audit current Gulp tasks to identify all tasks/dependencies that would need replacement
• Incrementally test replacement of each Gulp task with an equivalent NPM-based or similar script
• Test full build process, verifying CSS and JS outputs

[sfisher]

i believe for asset compilation (minifying CSS/Javascript, merging individual files into one, etc) there are some technologies such as Webpack and Vite. See https://pieces.app/blog/vite-vs-webpack-which-build-tool-is-right-for-your-project

I'm a tiny bit familiar with Webpack since Webpacker became popular in common Rails setups (Webpacker is a Ruby wrapper around the javascript Webpack library). I don't know much about Vite, but just that it's another popular alternative for compiling assets down into a more minified form that doesn't change too often and can be loaded once and reused from cache for subsequent page loads.

I believe these may be the most used NPM libraries for these particular kinds of tasks right now, though I'm not extremely up-to-date about these aspects. We can also check in with Joel H. to see if he has a way of working that he and other services are used to.