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

# npm install -D gulp-mem
yarn add -D gulp-mem

Usage

Import the module and set up your instance:

// 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:

// 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:

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

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