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's 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.

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.

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.

MIT. See LICENSE.md for details.