Add notices to auto-generated files with gulp

I wrote a little tool today to pop into my gulp workflow which writes some text to the top of files processed by gulp. The problem I find is that quite often you can be working on a project with source files and generated files (e.g. jsx -> js) and accidentally edit the wrong file, only for your changes to be overwritten.

This tool will put a notice at the top of auto-generated files to hopefully help put a stop to that. There are other packages that do this too, but so far in the past week there have been about 10 releases of gulp-header and quite a few of them were broken. Also they originated from godaddy so confidence in the package is pretty low!

Usage

You can use the default notice:

var gulp = require('gulp'), notice = require('gulp-notice'); gulp.task('default', function () { gulp.src('src/*.js') .pipe(notice()) .pipe(gulp.dest('dist/')); }); 

Which will prepend files with:

/* --------------------------------------------------------------------- *\ | This code was auto-generated by a tool. | | | | Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if | | the code is regenerated. | \* --------------------------------------------------------------------- */ 

Or you can provide your own string as the first parameter:

var gulp = require('gulp'), notice = require('gulp-notice'); var text = '/* this file was auto-generated */'; gulp.task('default', function () { gulp.src('src/*.js') .pipe(notice(text)) .pipe(gulp.dest('dist/')); }); 

Which will prepend files with:

/* this file was auto-generated */
 

Working wth streams

If you're working with streams (e.g. vinyl-source-stream) then gulp-streamify will help you. Let's say you're using browserify with vinyl-source-stream, you can wrap gulp-notice with streamify and it'll work:

return b.bundle()
 .pipe(source(entry))
 .pipe(streamify(notice()))
 .pipe(gulp.dest('./public/js'));
 

Install it

npm install gulp-notice
 

More links

GitHub: https://github.com/adamkdean/gulp-notice

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-notice