Adding a "Copy Without Minification" Task to Your Gulp Build Script

While working on a project for work I was presented with a plan to incorporate an animated jquery slider in our AngularJS application. I was able to wrap it in a directive and have every working honky-dory on gulp serve, but when I ran gulp build the jquery carousel widget wasn't working properly. It turned out that there were relative path references to other html, css, and JavaScript files declaring right there in the code with relative script tags. These import references were broken when the gulp build task did it's thing with minifying, uglifying, and concatenating files. Instead of going in and modifying the third party code, I was able to add these third party files into the project while keeping just these files safe from the build task. 

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The Theory Behind the Solution

Basically, the build task just says here are a bunch of subtasks that, when we call the build tasks, it just runs all of these other tasks. The build task by default has three dependency tasks: 'html', 'fonts', and 'other'. These tasks do things like generate the minified and concatenated project files over to your dist/ folder. What I'm going to do is add another task to the dependencies of the build task, I'll call this one 'no-min-copy'. Then it will look in my directory for app/no-min-copy, and it will straight up copy those files (no mininification or anything) over to a 'no-min-copy' directory inside of the dist directory. Then we can keep the relative paths in our third party code and shouldn't have problems.

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Updating the Code

It's not very difficult to add a new task in gulp once you understand how it works, but it can take a very long time to understand how it works. When we run gulp in the Gulp-Angular generated project it runs the gulp build task. Even at work, I normally scaffold new AngularJs projects with the Gulp-Angular yeoman generator. In the gulp folder of the scaffolding project is a file called build.js. 

gulp.task('no-min-copy', function () {
   return gulp.src([
      path.join(conf.paths.src, 'no-min/**/*.*')
   ])
     .pipe(gulp.dest(path.join(conf.paths.dist, '/no-min/')));
});

Then I'll add the no-min-copy task to the dependencies for the build task (note that in gulp 3 all the dependencies run in parallel so it doesn't matter what order you list the dependency tasks):

gulp.task('build', ['no-min-copy', 'html', 'fonts', 'other']);