Having spent a bit of time recently looking at some of the new stuff included in the tools and frameworks for ASP.Net Core 1.0 and Sitecore's Habitat solution, one of the things that caught my eye is the Gulp task runner. So after a few days of poking around, here's a basic introduction for anyone else considering it for their Sitecore work.
I suspect a fairly common scenario for Sitecore developers is launching a new site which replaces an existing one with a shiny new design and content structure. It's a fairly common requirement of these projects that whoever is in charge of SEO will want redirects in place from important old URLs on the site, to new ones. They ensure that users who have bookmarks to the old pages don't see 404s, and try to keep the search engine rankings which had been acquired by the old site.
Another common scenario these days is for new websites to serve all of their pages under HTTPS, rather than just the "sensitive" pages as we might have done in the past.
When you combine these two needs together, you can end up with more complicated redirection rules than you might have needed in the past. If you're planning to make use of the the Url Redirect module from the Sitecore Marketplace, my experiences doing this might be of help to you: