The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted introducing you to Elixir, the "Laravel way" of working with assets in your application and making it easier and more unified.

In today’s web applications, we use a wide variety of tools to speed up the development workflow while keeping the code base as lean as possible. [...] One such type of tool are preprocessors for CSS and JavaScript. [...] Besides preprocessors, there are also many tasks we as developers often have to do, including linting JS files, testing, concatenation, minification, just to name a few.

All this led to the creation of JavaScript-based task runners like Grunt and Gulp. [...] Gulp syntax is clean and easy to use, but there’s always room for doing things the easier way. Laravel 5 introduced Elixir: a Node.js based tool developed by Jeffrey Way, which manages our Gulp tasks the easy way.

They start with the requirements you'll need to get Elixir up and running, including Node.js and Gulp itself (it's a "frontend" for it, not a replacement). They talk about where Elixir assumes your assets will live and some examples of:

• Compiling Less files
• Compiling CoffeeScript files
• Compiling multiple files at once
• Using different source and output directories
• Concatenation files

...and much more. They also show how to perform Jade->Blade compilation for templating and how to configure Elixir to match your needs. The post ends with a more "real world" example with a full site structure, how to run the tasks and some more advanced topics (like custom tasks and using the assets in Blade templates).