Gulp giving error on symlinks in gulp.src()

Question

I have a symlink in my images folder that points to another folder containing external images provided by a third party library (managed by bower - gotta love javascript). As part of my build process, I compress all images as follows:

gulp.task('images', function() {
return gulp.src('static/img/**/*')
    .pipe(imagemin({ optimizationLevel: 3, progressive: true, interlaced: true }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('dist/img'))
});

When gulp gets to the symbolic link folder in the img folder, it returns

events.js:72
    throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
          ^
Error: EISDIR, read

Using gulp-debug shows that it baulks on the symlink folder. I am on Mac OSX and the symlink was created using ln -s. Any ideas?

Answer 1

gulp.src() uses node-glob, which doesn't crawl symlinks:

** If a "globstar" is alone in a path portion, then it matches zero or more directories and subdirectories searching for matches. It does not crawl symlinked directories.

Note that symlinked directories are not crawled as part of a **, though their contents may match against subsequent portions of the pattern. This prevents infinite loops and duplicates and the like.

I don't know if it's supposed to error or just skip them.

Answer 2

I was having the same problem when pointing to a symlink folder. The solution was simple, just used vinyl-fs package.

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

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