This project is no longer maintained. Gulp’s plugin blacklist system was removed in Gulp v5, and the Chrome extension no longer works due to the Manifest V2 deprecation.
Chrome extension that marks blacklisted Gulp modules when browsing NPM and GitHub.
A bit of history
It has been a while since I moved from Grunt to Gulp in my day-to-day build routine. When I first switched, I tried to port my Grunt process one to one. I searched for all the equivalent Gulp plugins and ended up building a kind of Gulp Frankenstein. This was not the best way to migrate, but in the end everything was faster (thanks to streams) and worked without problems.
I was happy with it, so I did not spend much time learning how Gulp really worked. That changed when I wanted to add Browserify to the Gulp pipeline. The first thing I did was search NPM (or GitHub) for something like “gulp browserify”, and I found it. The problem was that the package description had a confusing note: “THIS PLUGIN IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED , check out the recipes by gulp team for reference on using Browserify with Gulp.”
After searching around, I found out that the Gulp community keeps a pretty long blacklist of plugins that do not follow the Gulp guidelines or that are just duplicates.
I really like the idea of keeping the Gulp plugin ecosystem clean. What I find annoying is that every time I search for a plugin, I have to check the list to be sure I am picking the right one. In an ideal world, the maintainer would remove the plugin from NPM or at least, as with gulp-browserify, add a note saying it has been blacklisted.
We do not live in an ideal world, so on a lazy Sunday afternoon I created a little Chrome extension that shows you all the blacklisted plugins at first glance.
In action
Gulp Blacklist Marker works on module pages and on search results.
NPM module page:
NPM search result:
GitHub package:
GitHub repo:
Where to get it
The extension no longer works, but the source code is still on GitHub.