Working with Yeoman

Let's take a look at Yeomen. Yeomen is not part of MEAN Stack but allow us to quickly get startup providing us with generators that can create starter temples. It helps to setup the links between some or all the components of MEAN Stack, without having to do it all by hand. We will be focusing a developing an app with MEAN Stack in the tutorial. Let's begin installing Yeoman using npm.

$npm install -g yo

Now that yeoman is installed we can next install a generator with it. Let's head to yeoman.io website and click discover generators. We going to use the gulp-angular generator.

It will save us a lot of time setting up some tedious tasks that make our development process much faster. Gulp allow us to automate tedious and dependent tasks which are moving files over to publish folder or linking libraries or packages that needed our app. Click the gulp-angular generator and we can see the dependencies we need to install in order to run it. So let's open up our command prompt in order to do that. We also need to install bower, we can type both commands as follow. Bower is a package manager that works in the frontend, and finally, we install the generator.

$npm install -g gulp bower generator-gulp-angular

After installing we can go start our MEAN stack project by typing the following command in the command line inside your project folder.

yo gulp-angular my-test-app

As we create the app we will get asked several questions by the generator. After getting and collecting use statistics you will get ask what version of angular you would like to use. Then it asks what angular models we would like to use. Then ask about jQuery. Next, we will get asked by how we going to handle REST-full services and so on.  After that give a minute or two to install all of that.

After the installing is complete go and initialize it with the gulp command.

$gulp

Next, we can try out our app by typing gulp serve. This should automatically open the browser for us. As we can see the demo application is showing.

$gulp serve