You might want to 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
module for this example as it supports multiple files and globbing:
$ npm install --save-dev gulp del
Imagine the following 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:
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']);
You might want to delete some files after processing them in a pipeline.
We'll use vinyl-paths to easily get the file path of files in the stream and pass it to the del
method.
$ npm install --save-dev gulp del vinyl-paths
Imagine the following file structure:
.
├── tmp
│ ├── rainbow.js
│ └── unicorn.js
└── dist
var gulp = require('gulp');
var stripDebug = require('gulp-strip-debug'); // only as an example
var del = require('del');
var vinylPaths = require('vinyl-paths');
gulp.task('clean:tmp', function () {
return gulp.src('tmp/*')
.pipe(stripDebug())
.pipe(gulp.dest('dist'))
.pipe(vinylPaths(del));
});
gulp.task('default', ['clean:tmp']);
Only do this if you're already using other plugins in the pipeline, otherwise just use the module directly as gulp.src
is costly.