README.md

Writing a plugin

If you plan to create your own Gulp plugin, you will save time by reading the full documentation.

• Guidelines (a MUST read)
• Using buffers
• Dealing with streams
• Testing
• README conventions

What it does

### Streaming file objects

A gulp plugin always returns a stream in object mode that does the following:

1. Takes in vinyl File objects
2. Outputs vinyl File objects

These are known as transform streams (also sometimes called through streams). Transform streams are streams that are readable and writable which manipulate objects as they're being passed through.

Modifying file content

Vinyl files can have 3 possible forms for the contents attribute:

• Streams
• Buffers
• Empty (null) - Useful for things like rimraf, clean, where contents is not neeeded.

Useful resources

• File object
• PluginError
• event-stream
• BufferStream
• gulp-util

Sample plugins

• sindresorhus' gulp plugins
• Fractal's gulp plugins
• gulp-replace

About streams

If you're unfamiliar with streams, you will need to read up on them:

• https://github.com/substack/stream-handbook (a MUST read)
• http://nodejs.org/api/stream.html

Other libraries that are not file manipulating through streams but are made for use with gulp are tagged with the gulpfriendly keyword on npm.