Scaffolding > Yeoman

[addyosmani]

@jrcryer and I have been writing an in-depth article on getting started with Yeoman and generator-angular that might be a good fit for this.

We walk through the basics and how to scaffold out a complete app that readers build by the end of the article. A few other things that would be useful to cover:

• How Yeoman gets you super-productive with Grunt by recommending tasks relevant to the app workflow you care about
• Grunt best-practices baked in and referencable from our Gruntfiles
• Talk some more about the community, possible how to write your own generator

[jrcryer]

Braindump for the 'how to write your own generator':

• Use of Yeoman generator
• Keeping it simple, re-use existing node packages where possible
• Testing generator before pushing
• Adding menus to a generator for customisation of project
• Sub-generators

Largely following the guidance on http://yeoman.io/generators.html

[addyosmani]

@stephenplusplus I agree with @jrcryer's thoughts above on what we might want to cover for generator authoring. Would you be interested in helping with this part of the Yeoman chapter? Maybe re-purposing some of the content you wrote up for our docs and extending?

[tomlane]

Would like to help with writing or reviewing, as needs fit. :+1:

[addyosmani]

That would be amazing @tomlane :) @jrcryer a confirmation would be ace before we try to assign :)

[jrcryer]

Hi @addyosmani, I'm definitely up for writing and/or reviewing this section :)

[addyosmani]

@jrcryer how about we both co-author this chapter? We've been co-authoring the Yeoman + Angular piece which I can work on cleaning up and getting into a PR.

It would be great to also get in a section on writing your own generator to accompany it (as you mentioned above). Would you be cool with me assigning that to you?

[jrcryer]

@addyosmani sure - happy to write the section on writing your own generator. Also let me know if you still want me to wrap anything up with the article? :smile:

[addyosmani]

Will do! I'll take another look through it today.

[jrcryer]

Had a pretty busy week, hoping to pick my section up at the start of next week /cc @addyosmani

[addyosmani]

Thanks for the update! I've been working with the Yeoman team on refactoring our chapter. Updated to match latest Angular generator, all screenshots redone and a few other improvements.

On Wednesday, 15 January 2014 22:11:21, James Cryer < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Had a pretty busy week, hoping to pick my section up at the start of next week /cc @addyosmani https://github.com/addyosmani

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/tooling/book-of-modern-frontend-tooling/issues/4#issuecomment-32420938 .

[addyosmani]

@jrcryer I'm wondering if it would make sense to expand on the Yeoman codelab we wrote for yeoman.io for this item and include a better length introduction for developers that talks more about what the project gives you based on the structure we've discussed for other tooling sections. I'd be happy to work with you on that in a branch if so. Adding @pearlchen in case she has some cycles to help with this too or would be interested.

[jrcryer]

@addyosmani sure - this sounds great. I'm traveling a lot for the next week or so but definitely a great idea plus awesome if we can get @pearlchen collaborating on this. Sorry for letting this one drop for so long - hopefully can pick it back up now :smile:

Is there anything on the Yeoman roadmap that we need to consider whilst writing this?

[pearlchen-old]

I would love to help out.

I also tend to use in person workshops for unofficial user testing so I'll have some subjective feedback data after my May 1st Yeoman/Angular workshop.

I'll be revisiting the code lab over the next couple of weeks to scaffold it out (as in the educational academic term, not Yeoman vocabulary) for beginnners versus more experienced devs. On Apr 6, 2014 3:30 PM, "James Cryer" notifications@github.com wrote:

@addyosmani https://github.com/addyosmani sure - this sounds great. I'm traveling a lot for the next week or so but definitely a great idea plus awesome if we can get @pearlchen https://github.com/pearlchencollaborating on this. Sorry for letting this one drop for so long - hopefully can pick it back up now [image: :smile:]

Is there anything on the Yeoman roadmaphttps://github.com/yeoman/yeoman/issues/1264that we need to consider whilst writing this?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/tooling/book-of-modern-frontend-tooling/issues/4#issuecomment-39669812 .

[jrcryer]

Great - all sounds awesome! I'm done travelling for a little bit so should be able to focus on this over the Easter holidays. Do we want to pull together a checklist of things we want to put into this chapter?

[pearlchen-old]

My week & weekend is pretty open besides Friday. What's the best way to collaborate on this? Google Doc?

[jrcryer]

Google Docs work for me! Does the original codelab still exist in Google Drive?

[pearlchen-old]

It does but it's slightly out of date. I've got a forked version on my github but I feel like my version might be more biased towards screen-based reading. I would use the current published version to create a new doc. On Apr 18, 2014 1:14 PM, "James Cryer" notifications@github.com wrote:

Google Docs work for me! Does the original codelab still exist in Google Drive?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/tooling/book-of-modern-frontend-tooling/issues/4#issuecomment-40825771 .

[sindresorhus]

Is the thought to reuse the codelab or are we going in a different direction here?

[jrcryer]

I believe that is the idea - unless @addyosmani and @pearlchen have come up with some more awesome ideas? I think we may wanted to extend the chapter beyond codelab to include topics such as developing generators and best practises. Not sure how much it will cross over content on yeoman.io though and need to be careful content is repeated.

[pearlchen-old]

If you want to incorporate developing generators into the chapter, I would almost suggesting writing the chapter with that perspective in mind because it will keep the writing more focussed.

The codelab right now don't really touch on any of the magic behind the scenes. The audience is for users of Yeoman.

Alternatively, you can base off the codelab and then deconstruct how generator-angular was built along the way, and why it produces the results (code output) that it does.

[jrcryer]

Yeah, I see these are two separate topics with slightly different audiences so keeping them separate makes sense. I the like the idea of using the generator-angular generator as an example though.