Ability to create symlinks with vfs.symlink method

This is a continuation of some discussion in gulp-symlink, see: https://github.com/ben-eb/gulp-symlink/issues/19, https://github.com/ben-eb/gulp-symlink/issues/23#issuecomment-62816263

As previously stated, the current way we are handling symlinks using a transform stream, as we would use for manipulating a file’s contents, isn’t ideal. As symlinks are part of the file system it would make sense to provide this support in vinyl-fs, and by extension, gulp.

Ideally, this allows us to:

• Create symlinks with absolute or relative paths, depending on the user’s preference.
• Utilise transforms already in the pipe, such as gulp-rename to both rename and create the new symlink.

I think an API such as this would be good:

gulp.task('symlink', function() {
    return gulp.src('path/to/file')
        .pipe(gulp.dest('dist', {
            symlink: 'relative' // or 'absolute'
        }));
});

[OZZlE]

seems like with the current solution you cannot control where the symlink leads to “cwd, base, and path will be overwritten to match the folder”

The structure I have depends on the source file having a complete different folder structure than where the symlink should be placed inside. When I simply replaced gulp.dest() with vfs.symlink() it creates the symlink in the correct place but it leads to a non existing place.

I used gulp-rename to change the path but didn’t help.

[ben-eb]

Awesome. 👍