[digitalzombie]

You can do dependency check via Bower + NPM.

Your grunt or glup file can run a command to check for those dependency and update it via bower and npm.

Bower are for front end dependency check and NPM are for the backend dependency check.

Grunt and Glup are more of a task management system where you run tasks. Such as transpiling your jade/haml/sass, minifying your js, running your test cases. You can run these tasks in specific orders.

There's also gruntfile too but it's been a while since I've use these things. I think gruntfile are for grunt specific module for tasks though, so it'll dependency check grunt modules?

I'm a recovering frontend guy, well at least I did front end in a few gigs that were suppose to be fullstack.

[Arnavion]

greggman is talking about dependencies between build targets (such as files or directories or projects), eg: "lib.js depends on lib.coffee" + "lib.coffee's last modified time > lib.js's last modified time" = "must run task that regenerates lib.js"