After completing gulp.spritesmith, other developers asked me for good resources on writing a gulp plugin. This article is meant to serve as a public ledger of those resources.

If you are vague on the inner workings on of gulp, it is node's streams combined with a custom file system layer, known as vinyl.

This slideshow by @contra, one of gulp's authors, and explains this concept nicely.

If you are shaky on your knowledge of streams, some good references are:

• http://nodeschool.io/
• https://github.com/substack/stream-handbook
• Write a streaming library outside of gulp

If you are uncertain of where to get started/are stuck, try reading some other gulp plugins:

• https://github.com/wearefractal/gulp-concat
• https://github.com/sindresorhus/gulp-rev

Lastly, it is suggested to embrace utilities/modules. You can write everything from scratch but it will be more verbose than necessary. Some practical libraries are:

• https://github.com/rvagg/through2
• https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp-util