generator-sm-angular

Yeoman Generator for Enterprise Angular Projects

Features

• Provides a directory structure geared towards large Angular projects.
  • Each controller, service, filter, and directive are placed in their own file.
  • All files related to a conceptual unit are placed together. For example, the controller and HTML file for a partial are placed together in the same directory.
• Provides a ready-made Grunt build that produces an extremely optimized distribution.
  • Build uses grunt-ngmin so you don't have to use the Angular injection syntax for safe minification (i.e. you dont need $inject or (['$scope','$http',....
• Integrates Bower for package management
• Includes Yeoman sub-generators for directives, services, partials, and filters
• Integrates LESS and includes Bootstrap via the source LESS files allowing you to reuse Bootstrap vars/mixins/etc.
• Testable - Included Yeoman sub-generators also build test skeletons. Run test via grunt test.

Directory Layout

Below is an explanation of the folder structure.

/css ........................... usually only contains app.less
    app.less ................... main app-wide styles
/img ........................... images (not created by default but included in /dist if added)
/js ............................ app global javascript files
    setup.js ................... angular module initialization and route setup
/directive ..................... angular directives folder
    my-directive.js ............ example simple directive
    /my-directive2 ............. example complex directive (contains external partial)
        my-directive2.js ....... complex directive javascript
        my-directive2.html...... complex directive partial
        my-directive2.less ..... complex directive LESS
/filter ........................ angular filters folder
    my-filter.js ............... example filter
/partial ....................... angular partials folder
    /my-partial ................ example partial
        my-partial.html ........ example partial html
        my-partial.js .......... example partial controller
        my-partial.less ........ example partial LESS
/service ....................... angular services folder
    my-service.js .............. example service
/dist .......................... distributable version of app built using grunt and Gruntfile.js
/bower_component................ 3rd party libraries managed by bower
/node_modules .................. npm managed libraries used by grunt

The directive, filter, partial, and service directories won't exist until one of the relevant components is created using a sub-generator.

Getting Started

Prerequisites: Node, Grunt, Yeoman, and Bower. Once Node is installed, do:

npm install -g grunt-cli yo bower

Next, install this generator:

npm install -g generator-sm-angular

To create a project:

mkdir MyNewAwesomeApp
cd MyNewAwesomeApp
yo cg-angular

Grunt Tasks

Now that the project is created, you have 3 simple Grunt commands available:

grunt server  #This will run a development server with watch & reload enabled.
grunt test    #Run headless unit tests using PhantomJS.
grunt build   #Places a fully optimized (minified, concatenated, and more) in /dist

Yeoman Subgenerators

There are a set of sub-generators to initialize empty Angular components. Each of these generators will:

• Create one or more skeleton files (javascript, LESS, html, etc) for the component type
• Create a skeleton unit test in /test
• Update index.html and add the necessary script tags.
• Update app.less and add the @import as needed.
• For partials, update the setup.js, adding the necessary route call if a route was entered in the generator prompts.

There are generators for directive,partial,service, and filter.

Running a generator:

yo cg-angular:directive my-awesome-directive
yo cg-angular:partial my-partial
yo cg-angular:service my-service
yo cg-angular:filter my-filter

The name paramater passed (i.e. 'my-awesome-directive') will be used for directory and/or file names. The generators will derive appropriate class names from this parameter (ex. 'my-awesome-directive' will convert to a class name of 'MyAwesomeDirective').

One quick note, each sub-generator pulls the Angular app/module name from the package.json. Therefore, if you choose to change the name of your Angular app/module, you must ensure that the name in the package.json stays in sync.

Build Process

The project will include a ready-made Grunt build that will:

• Build all the LESS files into one minified CSS file.
• Uses grunt-angular-templates to turn all your partials into Javascript.
• Uses grunt-ngmin to preprocess all Angular injectable methods and add the necessary Angular annotations to ensure minification will not break your app (and you don't have to use the array syntax to manually add the annotations nor $inject). Read more about ngmin.
• Concatenates and minifies all Javascript into one file.
• Replaces all appropriate script references in index.html with the minified CSS and JS files.
• Minifies any images in /img.
• Minifies the index.html.
• Copies any extra files necessary for a distributable build (ex. Font-Awesome font files, etc).

The resulting build loads only a few highly compressed files.

The build process uses grunt-dom-munger to pull script references from the index.html. This means that the build will always pull all Javascript loaded in your index.html. Adding a new library, new controller, new directive, etc does not require that you update the build (also the order of the scripts in your index.html will be maintained when they're concatenated). Importantly, grunt-dom-munger uses JQuery selectors to manage the parsing of the script tags. It is very easy to exclude certain scripts from the build. For example, the project includes a references to the livereload.js from the grunt-contrib-watch task. But this file should not be included in a production build. Thus the grunt-dom-munger task is configured with a selector like script[data-build!="exclude"] and the script tag for livereload.js includes an attribute like data-build="exclude". You can use this flexibility in your project to include/exclude scripts in your production builds.

Release History

• 9/06/2013 - V1.0.4 - Fixed templating issue with generated specs for yo cg-angular:service subgenerator.
• 8/29/2013 - V1.0.3 - Renamed /lib back to /bower_components as clarity trumps brevity. Renamed /bin to /dist. Fixed spelling error in generated directive's js template location. Moved up to later version of yeoman-generator dependency to solve "Cannot read bold of undefined" error coming from Yeoman. JSHint options now read from .jshintrc. And more small stuff.
• 7/08/2013 - V1.0.2 - Added utf8 charset to index.html. Fix for "EMFile, too many open files" on grunt watch by no longer watching the lib folder.
• 6/20/2013 - v1.0.1 - Fixed a ton of known issues. Replaced grunt-regarde with grunt-contrib-watch. Fixed and tweaked the unit test specs and grunt test. Fixed issues with the build. Generator is now ready for real use.
• 6/18/2013 - v1.0.0 - Initial release of template as Yeoman generator.