Elixir (not to be confused with the functional programming language) is a build tool that provides a simple user interface and a series of conventions on top of Gulp. Elixir’s core feature is simplifying the most common Gulp tasks by means of a cleaner API and a series of naming and application structure conventions.

Since Elixir runs on Gulp, you’ll need to set up a few tools before using it:

1. First, you’ll need Node.js installed:

   curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash -
   sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

2. Next, you’ll need to install Gulp globally on your machine:

   sudo npm install --global gulp-cli

   Once Node and Gulp are installed, you will never have to run those commands again. Now you’re ready to install this project’s dependencies.
3. Open the project root in your terminal, and run:

   npm install

   to install the required packages (Laravel ships with an Elixir-ready package.json file to direct NPM).

You’re now set up! You can run gulp to run Gulp/Elixir once, gulp watch to listen for relevant file changes and run in response, or gulp scripts or gulp styles to just run the script or style tasks.