gulp.src does not copy subdirs within symlink

$ gulp -v
CLI version 1.2.2
Local version 4.0.0-alpha.2

Directory structure of images and symlink’ed directory (shared-assets):

├── images
│   └── branding -> ../shared-assets/branding/     (this is a symlink)
├── shared-assets
│   ├── branding
│   │   ├── img1.png
│   │   ├── img2.png
│   │   └── dir1
│   │       ├── img3.png
│   │       └── img4.png

gulp.src('..../images/**/*.{.jpg,.png}').pipe(gulp.dest('dist/images'))

Produces:

├── images
│   ├── branding
│   │   ├── img1.png
│   │   └── img2.png

gulp.src('..../images/**/*').pipe(gulp.dest('dist/images'))  // matches all files

Produces:

├── images
│   ├── branding
│   │   ├── img1.png
│   │   └── img2.png
│   └── dir1  (empty dir)

I expected dir1 and its contents to be in the output. To further clarify, I do want gulp to copy the contents (vs copying the symlink) which it does correctly with img1.png, img2.png, just not with subdirs or their contents img3.png, img4.png.

Is this expected behavior? Bug? I don’t feel like it’s a fault of my glob string, since I can use /**/*.{jpg,png} for any number of subdirs of any depth that aren’t symlinked.

[phated]

followSymlinks turns symbolic links into hard files (reads the contents of the linked file and creates duplicate files in the output, etc). It might be a poor name for what it actually does, but that’s what we have right now. follow does something different, in which it follows symlinks throughout a tree, and isn’t enabled by default in node-glob because it breaks on circular links. Those 2 behaviors are mutually exclusive so we can’t force follow on if followSymlinks is set to true.

It’s a frustrating state of naming but imagine followSymlinks as convertToFile and you’d have { follow: true, convertToFile: true } (notice how they are very different with better naming).

I’m going to close this and chalk it up to a documentation problem (which have multiple issues open), but I’ll open an issue on vinyl-fs to revisit the naming of the followSymlinks option. Thanks for bringing this up!

[mabar]

There is an option follow, which can help you. gulp.src('..../images/**/*', { follow: true })

But be aware of cyclic links. That kind of mistake maybe cause delete of all files.

Optionally, you can use workaround too

var vfs = require('vinyl-fs');

gulp.task('myTask', [], function() {
  vfs.src'..../images/**/*')
  .pipe(vfs.dest('dist/images'))
)};