Yeoman is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

client-side scaffolding tool for web applications. Yeoman runs as a

command-line interface A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

written for

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code ou ...

and combines several functions into one place, such as generating a starter template, managing dependencies, running

unit tests In computer programming, unit testing is a software testing method by which individual units of source code—sets of one or more computer program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures&mda ...

, providing a local development server, and optimizing production code for deployment. Yeoman was released at Google I/O 2012.

Overview

Yeoman combines several open source tools in an attempt to streamline many aspects of the web development process. Using a "generator" concept inspired by Ruby on Rails, Yeoman first creates a basic project structure with vendor libraries included. The most basic Yeoman generator supplies the HTML5 Boilerplate, Normalize.css, the jQuery JavaScript library, and

Modernizr Modernizr is a JavaScript library that detects the features available in a user's browser. This lets web pages avoid unsupported features by informing the user their browser isn't supported or loading a polyfill. Modernizr aims to provide feat ...

as a basic template for developers. Yeoman also runs interactively, asking the developer if they would like additional components such as Twitter Bootstrap or RequireJS (a library to support Asynchronous Module Definition) included. More sophisticated generators exist, such as ones which scaffold out a client-side MVC ( Model-View-Controller) framework, such as the

AngularJS AngularJS is a discontinued free and open-source JavaScript-based web framework for developing single-page applications. It was maintained mainly by Google and a community of individuals and corporations. It aimed to simplify both the development ...

or Backbone JavaScript libraries. Yeoman is meant to be modular such that anyone can design a generator to create a template for a particular type of project. More than 5600 generators have been created by the open source community. Beyond providing a template to scaffold projects, Yeoman also helps with intermediary phases of web application development. Yeoman lints code for potential problems using JSHint, runs unit tests, and provides a development server for working on an application. Finally, Yeoman also offers a build automation process featuring optimizations such as minification and concatenation of script files. All of these features use pre-configured tasks for the

Grunt Grunt, grunts or grunting may refer to: Sound and music * Grunting (tennis), in tennis refers to the loud noise, sometimes described as "shrieking" or "screaming", made by some players during their strokes * Death grunt, the death metal singin ...

JavaScript task runner. Yeoman is an open source project whose code is hosted on GitHub. Some of the primary contributors are on the

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...

Developer Relations team, such as Addy Osmani, Paul Irish, and Eric Bidelman.

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.yeoman.io/
GruntJS

HTML5 Boilerplate

Modernizr
2012 software HTML JavaScript libraries JavaScript programming tools Software using the BSD license Web development software