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