gulp-read

Gulp plugin to read vinyl file contents.

Installation

npm install --save-dev gulp-read

Usage

Basically whenever you can get away with using read:false at the beginning of a stream, but you still need the file contents at a later stage. Here's what a typical example might look like:

var gulp = require('gulp');
var changed = require('gulp-changed');
var read = require('gulp-read');
var imagemin = require('gulp-imagemin');
var remember = require('gulp-remember');
 
gulp.task('image', function() {
  return gulp.src('images/**', {read:false})
    .pipe(changed('dist/images'))
    .pipe(read())
    .pipe(imagemin())
    .pipe(remember())
    .pipe(gulp.dest('dist/images'));
});

In the above we don't have to read file contents initially since all gulp-changed cares about is the last modification date of each file.

After the unchanged files have been removed from the stream the contents of the remaining files are then read by gulp-read so they can be processed by gulp-imagemin.

In effect we never have to read the contents of files that haven't changed which saves time and speeds up the build.

Compatibiliy

Since this plugin is basically identical to the get-contents module of vinyl-fs it shouldn't make a difference whether file contents are read by gulp.src() or gulp-read.

API

read([options])

Reads the contents for each vinyl file from disk.

Options

• buffer: Whether or not the file contents should be a Buffer. Setting this to false will make file.contents a stream. (Default: true)
• force: Whether or not to reread file contents if they already exist. (Default: false)
• stripBOM: Whether or not to strip the BOM from file contents. (Default: true)

License

MIT