Excluding files/directories from Gulp task

Question

I have a gulp rjs task that concatenates and uglifies all my custom .JS files (any non vendor libraries).

What i am trying to do, is exclude some files/directories from this task (controllers and directives).

Heres my tree:

 - application
    - resources
      - js
        main.js
        - vendor
            - jquery
            - modernzr
            - angular
        - controllers
            - controller1
            - controller2
            - controller3
        - directives
            - directives1
            - directives2
            - directives3
        - widgets
            - widget1
            - widget2
            - widget3
            - widget4
        - modules
            - modules1
            - modules2
            - modules3
            - modules4

Here my gulp.js

dir = {
    app:        'application',
    dest:       'dest',
};

config = {
    src: {
        js: dir.app + '/resources/js'
    },
    dest: {
        js: dir.dest + '/resources/js'
    }
};

gulp.task('rjs', function() {

      rjs({
            baseUrl: config.src.js,
            out: 'main.js',
            name: 'main',
            mainConfigFile: config.src.js + '/main.js',
            exclude: [ 'jquery', 'angular']         
        })
        .pipe(prod ? uglify({ mangle: false, outSourceMap: true, compress: { drop_console: true } }) : gutil.noop())
        .pipe(gulp.dest(config.dest.js))
        .pipe(filesize())
        .pipe(dev ? connect.reload() : gutil.noop());

});

Answer 1

Quick answer

On src, you can always specify files to ignore using "!".

Example (you want to exclude all *.min.js files on your js folder and subfolder:

gulp.src(['js/**/*.js', '!js/**/*.min.js'])

You can do it as well for individual files.

Expanded answer:

Extracted from gulp documentation:

gulp.src(globs[, options])

Emits files matching provided glob or an array of globs. Returns a stream of Vinyl files that can be piped to plugins.

glob refers to node-glob syntax or it can be a direct file path.

So, looking to node-glob documentation we can see that it uses the minimatch library to do its matching.

On minimatch documentation, they point out the following:

if the pattern starts with a ! character, then it is negated.

And that is why using ! symbol will exclude files / directories from a gulp task

Answer 2

Gulp uses micromatch under the hood for matching globs, so if you want to exclude any of the .min.js files, you can achieve the same by using an extended globbing feature like this:

src("'js/**/!(*.min).js")

Basically what it says is: grab everything at any level inside of js that doesn't end with *.min.js