Creating a Yeoman generator and have it be version controlled - node.js

I'm wrapping my head around creating a Yeoman generator, so that Yeoman can generate our boilerplate whenever a new project is started.
The building blocks of this boilerplate should be version controlled. So I assume the generator (which will contain the rules for creating the boilerplate) should be hosted on github.
Which leads me to the question: if the generator itself is hosted on github, how will Yeoman save me any time? Because in order to use the latest version of the generator I would have to pull it off off github anyhow (which I could just as well do with the boilerplate itself, if it were hosted on github).
Or am I misunderstanding where a Yeoman generator is located? Because as I understand it you have to have it locally, or use one of the generators from the public repo.

You can quite easily publish it to npm using the command npm publish. Then you can install and upgrade it just like any other npm module. I did it myself for my first Yeoman generator and it's pretty straightforward.
This is a good place to start.

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Adding React-Native to a React project

I currently have a React based website. I want to start on the process of converting the website to also work natively through react-native. I understand that I will need to re-build the UI for the native version.
My goal however is to leave both versions in the same node project so I dont have to update my non-view based code separately for both versions of the code base.
Is it possible to add the dependencies and files necessary for react native while not having to separate the native code out into it's own completely separate project and if so how?
Lerna is a tool that optimizes the workflow around managing multi-package repositories with git and npm.

Is Node.js just used for dev-tooling on the front-end?

For my understanding, node.js is a javascript-engine which is running javascript-code without using a browser(window-global). You can use javascript on a server. But I saw now a lot of tutorials(react, angular, vue etc.). In every tutorial, I have to install something with npm. I can follow there are several dev-tools which I can use on my local machine to minimize my javscript-files or compile sass to css. But in the end, when I put my files on a webserver, I just have normal javascript-files, css-files etc. No node.js code in it, right?
My question is: React, angular, vue.js etc. are written in just normal javascript without node.js right? The reason why I use npm ist just to install every dependencies with one command, right?
A question more: Is there an any recommended order to learn all these frontend-development stuff? There are so much words I have to google it: angular.js, react, vue.js, vanilla.js, typescript, backbone.js, bower, grunt, webpack, yarn etc... I dont know where I start, so I look into few tutorials, but everytime I go through these tutorials, there is a new word(technology) I have to research.
I think you're getting your terminology a little muddled.
Node.js is a JavaScript runtime, built on Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. However, that is not to say that Node programs are executed in a browser. They aren’t. Rather, the creator of Node (Ryan Dahl) took the V8 engine and enhanced it with various features (such as a file system API and an HTTP library) to create a program we can use to execute JavaScript on our computers.
Node comes bundled with a package manager called npm which you can use to install packages (such as React and Angular) from the npm registry. These packages are indeed written in normal JavaScript (or a language that compiles to JavaScript, such as TypeScript).
The reason why I use npm is just to install every dependencies with one command, right?
Kinda. You can certainly use npm to install dependencies. However, it does a lot more that that. For example you can use npm scripts to carry out various build tasks, or you can create a package yourself and use npm to publish it to the registry.
A question more: Is there an any recommended order to learn all these frontend-development stuff?
As with everything, it depends. What are you trying to build? It's relatively pointless to learn about Node, npm, React and Angular if you are attempting to build a simple static website. If I were you, I'd define a clear goal and set about learning the technologies you'll need to reach that goal. Saying that, if you are doing anything with front-end development, learning about npm will be a good use of your time.
Here's an article by way of further reading that explains things a little more: https://www.sitepoint.com/an-introduction-to-node-js/

What's the lightest way to automate .vue file compilation without webpack?

I'm working on a web application that currently uses vuejs for part of its interface. The back-end is NOT in Node, so there is currently no package.json file or any tool from the typical npm stack in this repository.
We already have a bunch of non-npm dependencies that need to be installed in order to use the repository, so my coworkers aren't too open about the idea of adding another layer of complexity. I can't blame them for that, it's the reason why I use npm scripts and not even gulp in my other projects. I'm tired of spending hours learning and configuring build tools that never end up doing what I want anyway.
But since the vue-cli tool no longer includes the build command, I'm a bit stuck. Is there really no more CLI app to build vue files at all? And if so, what would be the smart way to use vue without webpack? Template strings are not maintainable at all, and <script type="text/x-template"> don't work when you want to use multiple components from multiple files in the same page.
I realize your question says 'without webpack' but you may be interested in backpack - a CLI app i came across for building Vue.js without requiring you to write any configuration code. It is basically webpack preconfigured as a minimalistic build system for Node.js. It provides two commands, dev for live reload enabled development and build for building you project.

what's required to make Polymer install and work without Node or NPM?

Polymer looks very good and I'd like to give it a try, however for our project, Node is not part of our platform and it cannot be. What is required to make a Polymer project that does not require Node or NPM?
Polymer does not require node or npm per se. We recommend using Bower (requires nodejs) to get elements because it handles the dependency management.
Alternatively, you can use git to fetch stuff. We have have a pull-all.sh script that gets you everything in a single checkout: http://www.polymer-project.org/resources/tooling-strategy.html#git
Moving forward, we're working on solutions to provide .zip files of element collections. Stay tuned!
To run polymer you need a basic web server. The web server can be in Node.js or in Python or any HTTP Web Server.

How to include Ember into an existing Node/Express.js App

I'm working on including Ember into an already deployed Node/Express/EJS application. I don't want to disrupt any of the existing application behavior, but instead, want build out any additional feature to the app using Ember. The server side code for these new features has already been built, and each endpoint returns the JSON format that Ember Data expects. I've been looking into Ember App Kit and Ember-cli, but I'm not sure how to include these tools into my existing directory structure, and I'm not certain if these are in face the right tools for my use case. Does anyone have any experience with this particular use case?
For example, navigating to /foo returns the existing express route that renders an ejs template, but /bar would be an Ember route that hits the api endpoint of the same name.
Use ember-cli (ember-cli.org). It's perfect for this situation as it allows you to rapidly prototype out your ember app. It even comes with an expressJS based testing suite and mocks server.
Once you are ready to incorporate it to your NodeJS, Flask, or whatever other application all static files should be available in the ember-cli dist directory.
Just don't forget to build the ember-cli project before porting via the means of ember build. After that it's just a simple matter of moving the files in the ember projects dist folder into wherever you need in your environment.
Just to embellish a bit: Ember-cli has a great work-flow for use while building your ember app. Try ember serve for a quick example. I mention this because it speaks to your question of how to incorporate this into your existing project (by project, I assume you may mean workflow). I typically will build ember projects purely using ember-cli and consider the back-end (usually a REST-API exposed via either Flask or NodeJS) a separate concern. When importing the app all I have to concern myself with is making sure my server serves the correct static dist files.
I would not recommend using the Ember App Kit (EAK) as it has been deprecated in favor of ember-cli. It really is.. much, much better.
Ok so I'm going to try to be more complete in this answer. Let's start with the isolated question - ember-cli or eak? Definitely Ember-Cli, but why?
EAK is officially heading for deprecation in favor of ember-cli.
Ember-cli produces more structured, cleaner, maintainable ember code.
Ember-cli integrates your entire ember-app workflow.
Managing all types of dependencies and assets is made simple via bower install --save and Brocfile.js edits. (See the ember-cli docus for explanation)
Now the more complicated part of the question. How do I integrate this with an existing workflow? I recently ran into this when building a webrtc-included ember app. It just so happened that this was my first real use of ember as well. So, not yet realizing the full potential of my new hammer I wrote the REST API, Backend ORM layer, the signalling service, the session cache, and built a complete CI workflow first. Then I was ready to build my ember app and ended up in your exact position.
To short circuit a long story - the lesson I learned was that I should treat my ember-cli app like a completely separate concern. What I mean here is - there's my backend (NodeJS, Apache, Nginx... whatever) and what I code here is built, tested and integrated separately. It normally even lives in its own git repository. It's a separate concern to my front end equation which typically would consist of several components itself. My I-Phone Native app would have its own workflow from build-to-test and integrate to my backend via a REST API. My Android native app another. My web app another. For all intents and purposes, in my workflow these are entirely separate workflows that only tie together when we start talking Continuous Integration.
There's a lot of arguments for why you'd want to do this. Most importantly - it scales.
The beauty of ember-cli is that it makes it fairly trivial to get a workflow for your ember app going and trivial to redeploy your app + workflow on a new box/instance. I would certainly recommend referring to the official ember-cli setup instructions but I'm going to include them here in case the URL goes bad one day:
No really, refer to the link my instructions will suck in comparison...
Deploying a new Ember App
Install NodeJS, NPM and Git (ember-cli will as a default load git going for you on new apps) on your system via sudo apt-get install nodejs and sudo apt-get install npm, sudo apt-get install git.
Note: On Ubuntu 14.04 and some other Debian systems use sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy instead. If in doubt, use legacy. If you experience problems using the node command after install, it's definitely that you need to use nodejs-legacy. Don't bother trying to do the linking manually.
Install required node modules globally: sudo npm install -g ember-cli, sudo npm install -g bower, sudo npm install -g phantomjs
Create new ember-cli app: cd <Desired Directory>, ember new my-app-name
Now you can look at ember help to begin learning how to use ember-cli. Hint: The --dry-run flag is your friend. You'll notice that when you installed ember-cli all the scaffolding was taken care of for you. You'll see that you can add things with simple ember generate commands and they will not only create the required objects, but the test files as well. Best of all, using ember serve you can start scaffolding your app and via simple flags you can configure the test server to actually proxy and use your already-existing REST API (if you have one) or the expressJS mocks server to build a psuedo-API.
Integrating it with your larger workflow from here is a simple matter of configuring whatever tools you use (I use Jenkins and Ansible for this kind of stuff) to distribute the dist folder of ember-cli to where it should go to be served as static content (it is just a single page webapp in the end).
If you want to instead play with an existing ember-cli app that operates in an isolated workflow and already makes use of most of the goodies in order to get some familiarity - as I suspect you'll quickly realize how to fit this into whatever your current structure is - feel free to clone and play with this one here.
And so finally - to answer the more specific question of how this might fit into an existing directory structure, I would break this down into two categories. When we're talking src - I would have it in it's own "structure", separated at least by being in a separate sub-directory of its own. When we're talking built and deliverable I would include the contents of the /dist folder in whatever static web server directory you want to serve your ember app from.
EDIT: I Added some more detail - hopefully useful details below the line break. Let me know if you have more questions or if I can explain anything better.
I am facing a similar situation. I am planning to use EAK as a "prototyping tool" in a separate project folder. Then build the distribution directory from EAK using grunt dist and insert that into the assets folder of my main Node.js project.

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