Dutchwebworks Yeoman Grunt generator

By Dennis Burger, may 2017

A Yeoman generator for creating a basic web site setup with Grunt. Yeoman consist of 3 tools: Yo, Grunt (or Gulp) and Bower.

Prerequsites

• NodeJS
• Yeoman, a scaffolding tool.
• Grunt, a JavaScript task runner.
• Bower, a package manager for the web.

One time installation

Make sure NodeJS is installed by going to the NodeJS website, download and install it for your operating system. This will also make the npm command-line tool available.

Open a command-line window (Terminal or MS-DOS) and type the following to globally (-g) install the above required NPM components all in one go:

npm install -g yo grunt-cli bower

On Windows make sure the MS-DOS promt-window is opened with 'Aministrator' privileges.

Download this Yeoman generator

Before you can use this generator you need to download it. Run the command below to globally install this generator.

npm install -g generator-dwwgrunt

Check globally installed NPM packages

To view your globally installed NPM list type the following. The new Yeoman generator should be listed here.

npm ls -g --depth=0

Using this generator in a new project

Create and cd to a new (empty) project directory where we'll use this generator as a starting point for a new project. Now type:

yo dwwgrunt

Yeoman questions

You will be greated by Yeoman and it will ask you some basic questions regarding this project. This meta-data information is used inside some of the Yeoman generated files, like: package.json, bower.json and your project's README.md file.

NPM and Bower installation

Once Yeoman is done generating the new project files it will also kick-in Bower to install the predifined project frontend packages like jQuery and Modernizr for your new project. See the bower_components/ directory. Along with the regular NPM install for this new project which will install Grunt and some Grunt plugins.

Removing this Yeoman generator

To unlink (remove) this Yeoman generator, type:

npm uninstall -g generator-dwwgrunt