Use conventional text streams at the start of your gulp or vinyl pipelines, making for nicer interoperability with the existing npm stream ecosystem.
Take, for example, browserify. There's the
gulp-browserify and
gulpify plugins, which you can use in
combination with gulp to get browserify working in your build. Unfortunately,
these plugins come with additional overhead: an extra GitHub repository, npm
module, maintainer, tests, semantics, etc. It's much simpler
in this case to use the original module directly where you can, which is what
vinyl-source-stream
handles for you.
Our previous example, browserify, has a streaming API for its output bundles
which you can use directly. This module is just a bridge that makes it
simple to use conventional text streams such as this in combination with gulp.
Here's an example of using vinyl-source-stream
and browserify
, compared to
using gulpify
:
var source = require('vinyl-source-stream')
var streamify = require('gulp-streamify')
var browserify = require('browserify')
var uglify = require('gulp-uglify')
var gulpify = require('gulpify')
var rename = require('gulp-rename')
var gulp = require('gulp')
// using gulpify:
gulp.task('gulpify', function() {
gulp.src('index.js')
.pipe(gulpify())
.pipe(uglify())
.pipe(rename('bundle.js'))
.pipe(gulp.dest('./'))
})
// using vinyl-source-stream:
gulp.task('browserify', function() {
var bundleStream = browserify('./index.js').bundle()
bundleStream
.pipe(source('index.js'))
.pipe(streamify(uglify()))
.pipe(rename('bundle.js'))
.pipe(gulp.dest('./'))
})
Not all that different, really! The nice thing here is that you're getting the up-to-date browserify API and don't have to worry about the plugin's available functionality. Of course, these same benefits apply for any readable text stream you can find on npm.
Creates a through stream which takes text as input, and emits a single vinyl file instance for streams down the pipeline to consume.
filename
is a "pretend" filename to use for your file, which some streams
might use to determine various factors such as the final filename of your file.
It should be a string, and though recommended, using this argument is optional.
MIT. See LICENSE.md for details.