Merge pull request gulpjs#623 from sindresorhus/delete-recipe

add recipe for deleting files

docs/recipes/README.md

@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 # Recipes
 
 * [Combining streams to handle errors](combining-streams-to-handle-errors.md)
+* [Delete files and folders](delete-files-folder.md)
 * [Fast browserify builds with watchify](fast-browserify-builds-with-watchify.md)
 * [Incremental rebuilding, including operating on full file sets](incremental-builds-with-concatenate.md)
 * [Make stream from buffer (memory contents)](make-stream-from-memory-buffer.md)

docs/recipes/delete-files-folder.md

@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+# Delete files and folders
+
+You might want delete some files before running your build. Since deleting files doesn't work on the file contents there's no reason to use a gulp plugin. An excellent opportunity to use a vanilla node module.
+
+Let's use the [`del`](https://github.com/sindresorhus/del) module for this example as it supports multiple files and [globbing](https://github.com/sindresorhus/multimatch#globbing-patterns):
+
+```sh
+$ npm install --save-dev gulp del
+```
+
+Imagine this file structure:
+
+```
+.
+├── dist
+│   ├── report.csv
+│   ├── desktop
+│   └── mobile
+│       ├── app.js
+│       ├── deploy.json
+│       └── index.html
+└── src
+```
+
+In the gulpfile we want to clean out the contents of the `mobile` folder before running our build:
+
+```js
+var gulp = require('gulp');
+var del = require('del');
+
+gulp.task('clean:mobile', function (cb) {
+  del([
+    'dist/report.csv',
+    // here we use a globbing pattern to match everything inside the `mobile` folder
+    'dist/mobile/**',
+    // we don't want to clean this file though so we negate the pattern
+    '!dist/mobile/deploy.json'
+  ], cb);
+});
+
+gulp.task('default', ['clean:mobile']);
+```