Yeoman is a tool for scaffolding out a new web application, creating directories and files to get you started on your latest project. What makes yeoman different from similar tools however is that it champions a modern workflow through the use of Grunt for building and testing the application, and Bower for installing client-side dependencies.

Yeoman scaffolds applications by using generators. Generators are installed separately to to yeoman and are usually geared towards a certain type of project e.g. generator-angular for angularjs projects or generator-chrome-extension for creating chrome extensions. A full list of generators is available here.

At the moment most of the yeoman generators are geared towards front-end development, I found it great to use to quickly get started with a new project and saw no reason why I couldn't use it to generate the starting point for a server-side application.

The Generator

View github repo

I've created a generator that scaffolds an expressjs application. This contains 2 generators:

• The basic generator which is based on the express command line utility with added grunt tasks and bower setup.
• An MVC style generator which is based around node-express-mongoose-demo

Getting Started

• Make sure you have yo installed npm install -g yo
• Install the generator locally: npm install generator-express
• Run: yo express for the basic generator OR yo express:mvc for the MVC generator
• Run: grunt this will run a local server at localhost:3000

Once the server is running you can edit client-side or server-side files and once saved the browser will automatically refresh and show your changes. This is done through the grunt-contrib-watch task, which can be viewed and edited in the Gruntfile.js.

You can use bower to install client-side packages which will be placed into the public/components directory. For example using bower install jquery will download and install jquery to public/components/jquery.