Gulp-tar

Gulp-tar is a Gulp plugin that allows you to create tar files. It automates the process of creating tar archives and can be used to bundle up your project files for distribution or deployment.

Installation

To use Gulp-tar, you need to have Gulp installed on your system. If you haven't installed it yet, you can do it by running the following command:

npm install gulp --global

Once you've installed Gulp, you can install Gulp-tar by running the following command:

npm install gulp-tar --save-dev

Usage

Once you've installed Gulp-tar, you can start using it in your Gulpfile.js. To begin, require the plugin as follows:

var tar = require('gulp-tar');

Then, you can create a task that uses Gulp-tar to bundle up your project files. For example, you can create a task that compresses all the JavaScript files in a directory and creates a tar file:

gulp.task('compress-js', function() {
  return gulp.src('js/*.js')
    .pipe(tar('js-files.tar'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('dist'));
});

In the above example, gulp.src() selects all the JavaScript files in the js directory, tar() creates a tar archive named js-files.tar, and gulp.dest() saves the archive in the dist directory.

You can also specify the compression format of the tar archive by passing an options object to tar(). For example, to create a gzip-compressed tar archive, you can do the following:

.pipe(tar({ gzip: true, file: 'js-files.tar.gz' }))

In this case, gzip: true specifies that the archive should be compressed using gzip, and file: 'js-files.tar.gz' specifies the name of the archive file.

For more information about the options you can pass to tar(), see the node-tar module documentation.

Conclusion

Gulp-tar is a useful Gulp plugin that simplifies the process of creating tar archives. With Gulp-tar, you can automates the bundling of your project files into a compressed file, making it easy for deployment or distribution.