Hard drive i/o is slow and writing to your ssd reduces its lifespan. This gulp plugin provides an in-memory destination for development builds without having to make a ramdisk or symlink your build folder into one.

Installation

``bash

npm install -D gulp-mem

yarn add -D gulp-mem
`

Usage

Import the module and set up your instance:

`javascript
// Import the module.
const GulpMem = require('gulp-mem')

// Create your instance.
const gulpMem = new GulpMem()

// Set the base path to match your build destination.
// "/" or "./" corresponds to the mock filesystem root.
// If you build to "%PROJECT_PATH%/build" set your base path to "./build".
gulpMem.serveBasePath = './build'
`

Pipe stuff into gulpMem.dest instead of gulp.dest to write it to the in-memory filesystem:

`javascript
// You may want to use separate gulp sequences for dev and production builds,
// but you could also do some other inline check or conditionally patch the method.

gulp.task('build:dev', () => {
return gulp.src('./*/')
// ...
// Write to memory:
.pipe(gulpMem.dest('./build'))
})

gulp.task('build:prod', () => {
return gulp.src('./*/')
// ...
// Write to disk:
.pipe(gulp.dest('./build'))
})
`

Now you can serve the memory contents through your dev server using the middleware at gulpMem.middleware. Most likely you'll want to use something like BrowserSync:

`javascript
gulp.task('start-dev', () => {

// Start your dev server using the middleware:
browserSync.init({
server: './build',
middleware: gulpMem.middleware,
})

// Set up your watchers...
})
`

If you already have a server running in another process you can start a minimal http server in your gulp process and proxy to/from it.
You can also use the filesystem api on gulpMem.fs or patch in a different implementation.

Optional Configuration

`javascript
// Specify logging functions.
gulpMem.logFn = console.log
gulpMem.errorFn = console.error
``