Writing Custom Yeoman App Generators

The page says Yeoman generators can scaffold a project with chosen boilerplates, frameworks, and dependencies. It separates simple boilerplate copiers from fuller application scaffolders, and shows that community members can write and share generators for different workflows.

Reading notes

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• Yeoman generators can kick off a new project or part of a project without manually writing a boilerplate.
• A generator may only copy an existing boilerplate, or it may add customization prompts, unit tests, and documentation.
• Two generator types are listed: boilerplate copiers and application scaffolders.
• Boilerplate generators write an existing boilerplate project into the application directory when run with yo.
• Application scaffolders can cover build systems, sub-generators, dependency management, and workflow automation.
• Existing official generators can be forked and customized for another workflow.
• A boilerplate generator example shows cloning a generator project, adding a boilerplate under app/templates, editing package.json and README.md, installing dependencies, and running yo awesome.
• A tarball URL can be used instead of submodules to bring a boilerplate into a generator.
• Yo runs app/index.js by default inside a generator directory.
• generator-generator can create a full generator project with editorconfig, package.json, tests, and other defaults.
• The built-in yo generator command can also create a new generator directly from the command line.
• The index.js file is the entry point, and templates is where files for the generator live.
• The example Base class code defines options and a scaffold method that copies a template directory to a target location.
• The generator-bootstrap example uses prompts to ask for Bootstrap format and then installs the matching package with bowerInstall.
• Prompts can collect user input through name, message, default, and warning fields.
• this.copy() and this.template() copy files from the templates directory into the user’s project.
• this.write() writes custom content to files, and this.mkdir() creates directories.
• this.readFileAsString() imports file content as a string.
• A generator can append scripts and files, replace body content in an index file, and prepare default page content.
• Dependencies can be installed at the end with installDependencies.
• Sub-generators can be hooked in with this.hookFor and later called on their own.
• Files can also be pulled remotely with this.remote(), then copied into the project.
• The page points readers to generator internals and suggests studying existing generators such as HTML5 Boilerplate, Mobile Boilerplate, and AngularJS.
• The FAQ mentions Bower dependency installation, unit testing, sub-generators, extending beyond the API with npm packages, and publishing to npm.