Using the pipe method

A pipe is used to connect streams together. DOS and Unix-like shells use the vertical bar (|) to pipe the output of one program to another; we chain several pipes together to process and massage data in a number of ways.

Likewise, the Streams API affords us the pipe method to channel data through multiple streams. Every readable stream has a pipe method that expects a writable stream (the destination) as its first parameter.

In this recipe, we're going to pipe several streams together.

Getting ready

Let's create a folder called piper, initialize it as a package, install tar-map-stream, and create an index.js file:

$ mkdir piper 
$ cd piper 
$ npm init -y 
$ npm install tar-map-stream 
$ touch index.js

How to do it...

In our index.js file, let's begin by requiring the dependencies we'll be using to create various streams:

const zlib = require('zlib') 
const map = require('tar-map-stream') 

Let's imagine we want to take the gzipped tarball of the very first available version...