The SitePoint PHP has posted an interesting tutorial describing a Node.js frontend workflow without Node.js, instead using PHP tools to replace the Node.js functionality needed for the build.

If you’re intimidated, exhausted or irritated by Gulp, Grunt, NPM, Yeoman, and all the other NodeJS tools that aim to help but often do the opposite, a good asset management workflow is possible in PHP, and this tutorial aims to prove it. In this article, we’ll go through a NodeJS-free PHP front end asset management setup.

He uses three tools to create the build process: BowerPHP for installing assets, markstory/mini-asset for minification and Robo for automation. He sets up a Homestead virtual machine instance as a testing ground first then creates a basic Slim-based application from the slim3-skeleton package. He gets the necessary tools installed via Composer then gets into the details of the process. He adds (Twitter) Bootstrap into his assets, shows how to set up the minification and creates a Robo task to watch the CSS for any changes. This task then re-runs the minifaction on the CSS and created the condensed version automatically.