vinyl-source-stream

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 are 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.

Usage

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.

API

stream = sourceStream([filename])

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.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.md for details.