gulp-sym

Gulp symlink module

Deprecation warning

In favor of https://github.com/ben-eb/gulp-symlink See https://github.com/ben-eb/gulp-symlink/issues/15

Installation

npm install gulp-sym --save-dev {--production}

Usage

Simple example

var symlink = require('gulp-sym')

gulp
	.src('source')
	.pipe(symlink('path/to/link'))
	//note that it'll return source streams not the symlink ones

Advanced example

var symlink = require('gulp-sym')
  , p = require('path')
  , File = require('gulp-util').File

gulp
	.src(['path/**/to/some/dir/', '!path/example/to/some/dir'])
	//source is a vinyl instance
	.pipe(symlink(function(source) {

		//for example link source is my/dest/path/dirname where dirname matches the glob pattern
		return p.join('my/dest/path', source.relative.split(p.sep)[0])

		//you might also return a vinyl instance if you wanted a different cwd
		return new File({cwd: '/home', path: './symlink'})

	}, { force: true })) //use force option to replace existant

Options

• force (bool): force overwrite symlink
• relative (bool): your link will be relative

/!\ Don't do this ...

If you're working on more than 1 source, use a function or an array to specify the destination path so gulp-sym doesn't override the previous symlink!

Here is a counterexample, dest will be a link to source/path/two and the first one will not have any symlink!

gulp
	.src(['source/path/one', 'source/path/two'])
	.pipe(symlink('dest', {force: true})) //bad shit WILL happen
	

... but this

That's how it should be:

gulp
	.src(['source/path/one', 'source/path/two'])
	.pipe(symlink(['dest/one', 'dest/two']))
	

or through a function that'll be called on each source

gulp
	.src(['source/path/one', 'source/path/two'])
	.pipe(symlink(function(source) {
		return p.resolve(source.path, '../../dest', p.basename(source.path))
	})

It's intendend behavior and api will not change for this, I could warn the user in this case - to be discussed.

Why?

I'm aware that there is another symlink module for gulp but as of v0.1.0 it didn't fit my needs and seems to get messy (absolute/relative). In this plugin, paths are always absolute and resolves from the cwd that you might change by passing a vinyl instance to the destination function.

gulp-symlink :

• has no force option to replace existing link
• uses fs.symlink twice instead of using fs.exists. I'm aware of the nodejs docs specifying that fs.exists is there on an historical purpose only but why shouldn't we use it?
• doesn't use the specified type option mentioned in the nodejs docs (windows only)
• has no test on symlinking directories (maybe why tests are good to go on windows)
• has bad support on multiple sources (at the moment)

Licence

MIT