gulp: Can't exclude directories using src glob

@aaronbushnell

gulp.src(['app/**', '!app/{_tmp,_tmp/**}'])

why?

• !app/_tmp would match only the folder, but not any file within it - since it’s not a globbing expression (a bug?)
• !app/_tmp/** would match the files IN the _tmp folder, but not the folder itself, so the empty folder would be created

using the !app/{_tmp,_tmp/**} pattern uses a pattern to combine the both requirements and says:

give me all the dirs/files in app folder EXCEPT for _tmp folder content and the _tmp directory itself

😃

The way I’ve made this work is to exclude the directory and the contents like so: gulp.src(['app/**', '!app/_tmp', '!app/_tmp/**'])

It can be golfed further to !app/_tmp{,/**} so you don’t need to repeat the directory name.

@chovy You have a space there that messes things up: {vendor, vendor/**}.

Just as a note, I used to use:

gulp.src([
  '!node_modules{,/**}',
  '!dist{,/**}'
])

But then converting it to:

gulp.src([
  '!node_modules',
  '!node_modules/**',
  '!dist',
  '!dist/**'
])

Shaved off at least 3 whole seconds from my task. Just a heads up, you might want to test your task if you care about performance; it would appear the dir{**} notation is really slow.

I want to match everything except bower_components and anything inside. So, I used the following code as suggested, but this still matches any folder that has .html files inside, together with those files.

return gulp.src([
        'src/*',
        '!src/**/*.html',
        '!src/bower_components{,/**}'
    ]

Any suggestions?

Thank you, @ktstowell, your solution worked really well. I’m working with Gulp Zip. It was really cumbersome to exclude a few folders/files and keep everything else including the project tree as it is.

@stryju Thank you for your solution of using !{_tmp,_tmp/**} method. I was using !(.gitignore,.sftp-config.json) to exclude a few files, but that didn’t work.

Here’s my code:

var gulp             = require( 'gulp' ),
    zip              = require( 'gulp-zip' );

gulp.task( 'zip', function() {

  return gulp.src( [
    '!{.gitignore,sftp-config.json}',
    '!node_modules', '!node_modules/**',
    '!dist', '!dist/**',
    '!assets/bower_components', '!assets/bower_components/**',
    './**',
  ] )
    .pipe( zip('archive.zip') )
    .pipe( gulp.dest( 'dist' ) );

});

['!node_modules', '!node_modules/**', './**'] Worked for me, though I do like @aaronbushnell 's proposition in https://github.com/isaacs/minimatch/issues/25

This works well for me:

gulp.src(['app/**', '!app/_tmp{,/**/*}'])

@sindresorhus No dice. Now the dist/_tmp/ directory has the files from app/_tmp/ inside it.

You’re globbing for files, if you want to ignore the dir you need to: gulp.src(['app/**', '!app/_tmp/'])