create-volto-app reimplemented as Yeoman generator

tiberiuichim commented 4 years ago

Benefits, some already implemented, some low-hanging fruit:

biggest improvement: allow re-running a generator over an existing Volto project, to update the project files to latest template files from the generator. See for how this would look like. There's options like:
allows (future) unification of create-volto-app with volto-addon-cli, to be able to generate addons from the same package
Easier maintainance of the create-volto-app package. The generator uses npm Package Registry to check the latest Volto release and uses that in the generated dependencies. It downloads the yarn.lock file from that Volto release
It understands some command line options:

Usage:
  yo create-volto-app:app [<projectName>] [options]

Options:
  -h,   --help          # Print the generator's options and usage
        --skip-cache    # Do not remember prompt answers                                        Default: false
        --skip-install  # Do not automatically install dependencies                             Default: false
        --addon         # Addon loader string, like: some-volto-addon:loadExtra,loadOtherExtra
        --description   # Project description                                                   Default: A Volto-powered Plone frontend

Arguments:
  projectName    Type: String  Required: false

You can pass multiple --addon options and it will list them in the generated package.json. For the future, I'll enhance this to also allow a mrs.developer file to be passed as an option.

tiberiuichim commented 4 years ago

This is how you can test the package:

run npm install --global yo
make a clone of this branch
run "yarn && yarn link" inside it
run yo create-volto-app bla --description "hello world" --addon one:x,y --addon two:z,t for an example of how it works
edit the package.json to remove the bogus addons, but otherwise you can run "yarn" and "yarn start" in the generated project

tiberiuichim commented 4 years ago

To reviewers: be aware that this is a completely new package (instead of @plone/create-volto-app, it needs to be generator-create-volto-app. Timo suggested that we might use a different repo for that package. Maybe even include it in the Volto code source, although this will imply that we make Volto a multi-package repo. In any case, to me, generator-volto sounds nice, and it can include a yo volto:addon template, for Volto addon templates.

tiberiuichim commented 4 years ago

@jenkins-plone-org please run jobs

nzambello commented 4 years ago

I like this! Seems really interesting

tiberiuichim commented 4 years ago

Issues: gitignore file is not properly generated. package.json.tpl is not properly excluded.

sneridagh commented 3 years ago

I love it! I really think we should continue explore this.

@tiberiuichim can we make it a @plone repo? I already hacked around it a bit :)

tiberiuichim commented 3 years ago

@sneridagh Sure! Go ahead, fork it in plone.

tiberiuichim commented 3 years ago

@sneridagh Be aware that yeoman generators don't like namespaces (I think) if you want to run them with yo

tiberiuichim commented 3 years ago

Work continues in https://github.com/plone/generator-volto-app/

plone / create-volto-app

create-volto-app reimplemented as Yeoman generator #26