Streams

Gulp is designed to process your files from one state to another.

I said earlier to imagine it as a factory. It should have entry points for raw material and exit points for finished products.

gulp.src and gulp.dest are destined exactly to do that: theses functions respectively starts the flow of files and redirect the processed ones. pipe function is the conveyor from a job to another.

A dead simple example:

gulp.task('copy-files', function() {
    gulp.src('source/folder/**')
        .pipe( gulp.dest('dest/folder/**') );
});

gulp copy-files will do the intended copy.