Delete Files Using Gulp

Remarks#

Note on using the globbing pattern (**):

The globbing pattern matches all children and the parent. In order to avoid that we add '!public' to our del task so that the public directory itself doesn’t get deleted

Delete files using del

First, Install gulp and del to project directory locally

npm install --save-dev gulp del

Then add the clean task to your gulpfile.js

var gulp = require('gulp');
var del = require('del');

gulp.task('default', function() {
});

// Task to delete target build folder
gulp.task('clean', function() {
  return del(['public/**', '!public']);
});

gulp.task('default', ['clean']);

This task deletes all files in the public directory

The task in the code is added as a dependency for the 'default' task so every time default will run, clean will run before it.

You can also call the clean task manually by running the command:

gulp clean