Yeoman

I’ve been working on more and more web applications both at work and for myself and I have been using a great tool to help me do this, it’s call Yeoman.

Yeoman is a set of tools that work really well together when building Web applications. It’s been made by some of the leading people in the industry with considerations for best practices.

Yeoman is made of,

  • Yo - Which is used to generate a scaffold for your projects
  • Bower - Which is for package management
  • Grunt - Which is the build system

With some simple commands Yeoman will layout your project and install all the JavaScript libraries you need. Yeoman has generators for AngularJS, Backbone.js, Ember.js, and along with a plain Web App generator if you do not want to use any JavaScript frameworks. If you are unable to find a generator you want you can make one that best fits your workflow.

As you are building your application Yeoman will help you by giving you a live preview as you are working. It will also compile any CoffeeScript or SASS files you have automatically. There are also many plug-ins you can get for just about anything you would want to use.

After you are done writing your application, Yeoman will help you with getting your application ready to be deployed by minifying your JavaScript and CSS along with optimizing your images.

No matter what the size of the application I’m always going to use Yeoman to help me. Yeoman has save me tons of time and I would recommend it to anyone who’s working on building web application or even just a site.