Command line tool and developer framework for scaffolding out new GitHub projects. Generate offers the robustness and configurability of Yeoman, the expressiveness and simplicity of Slush, and more powerful flow control and composability than either.

generate

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Table of contents

• Why use Generate?
• Features
• Developer toolkit
• Command line usage
  • Install Generate
  • Install a generator
  • Next steps
• Command line arguments
  • generator.js
• Generators
  • Discovering generators
  • Discovering plugins
  • Authoring generators
• More information
• About
  • Related projects
  • Community
  • Contributing
  • Running tests
  • Author
  • License

(TOC generated by verb using markdown-toc)

Command line usage

Generate may be installed locally or globally. However, if you wish to run any globally installed generators, Generate's CLI must be installed globally as well.

Install Generate

Install generate globally using npm:

$ npm install --global generate

This adds the gen command to your system path, allowing it to be run from anywhere.

Install a generator

If you'd like to see how generators work, install generate-example:

$ npm install --global generate-example

Then run the example generator with the following command:

$ gen example

Visit the generate-example project for additional steps and guidance.

Next steps

• Browse the documentation
• Learn about generators
• Learn about the built-in generators
• Learn about authoring generators
• Learn about setting options in templates

Command line arguments

The syntax for running generators is:

$ gen generator:task

• generator one or more space-separated generator names
• task - (optional) one or more comma-separated task names

Examples

# run generate-project's "default" task
$ gen project
# run generate-project's "license" task
$ gen project:license
# run generate-project's "package" task
$ gen project:package

generator.js

If a generator.js is in the current working directory, Generate's CLI will attempt to load it and execute any tasks you've specified at the command line.

Examples

Generators

generators are plugins that can be run by command line or using Generate's API.

Discovering generators

• Find generators to install by searching npm for packages with the keyword generategenerator
• Visit Generate's GitHub org to see the generators maintained by the core team

Discovering plugins

Plugins from any applications built on base should work with Generate (and can be used in your generator):

• base: find base plugins on npm using the baseplugin keyword
• assemble: find assemble plugins on npm using the assembleplugin keyword
• generate: find generate plugins on npm using the generateplugin keyword
• templates: find templates plugins on npm using the templatesplugin keyword
• update: find update plugins on npm using the updateplugin keyword
• verb: find verb plugins on npm using the verbplugin keyword

Authoring generators

Visit the documentation for generators to learn how to use, author and publish generators.

More information

• Discover generators authored and maintained by the Generate core team
• FAQ
• Documentation
• API documentation

About

Related projects

• assemble: Get the rocks out of your socks! Assemble makes you fast at creating web projects… more | homepage
• base: Framework for rapidly creating high quality node.js applications, using plugins like building blocks | homepage
• update: Be scalable! Update is a new, open source developer framework and CLI for automating updates… more | homepage
• verb: Documentation generator for GitHub projects. Verb is extremely powerful, easy to use, and is used… more | homepage

Community

Are you using Generate in your project? Have you published a generator and want to share your project with the world?

Here are some suggestions!

• If you get like Generate and want to tweet about it, please feel free to mention @generatejs or use the #generatejs hashtag
• Show your love by starring Generate and generate
• Get implementation help on StackOverflow (please use the generatejs tag in questions)
• Gitter Discuss Generate with us on Gitter
• If you publish an generator, thank you! To make your project as discoverable as possible, please add the keyword generategenerator to package.json.

Contributing

Pull requests and stars are always welcome. For bugs and feature requests, please create an issue.

Please read the contributing guide for advice on opening issues, pull requests, and coding standards.

Running tests

Running and reviewing unit tests is a great way to get familiarized with a library and its API. You can install dependencies and run tests with the following command:

$ npm install && npm test

Author

Jon Schlinkert

• github/jonschlinkert
• twitter/jonschlinkert

License

Copyright © 2017, Jon Schlinkert. Released under the MIT License.

This file was generated by verb-generate-readme, v0.6.0, on June 02, 2017.

Release history

key

Changelog entries are classified using the following labels (from keep-a-changelog):

• added: for new features
• changed: for changes in existing functionality
• deprecated: for once-stable features removed in upcoming releases
• removed: for deprecated features removed in this release
• fixed: for any bug fixes
• bumped: updated dependencies, only minor or higher will be listed.

[0.13.0] - 2016-10-01

Fixed

• improve answer handling in ask listener
• update dependencies

[0.12.1] - 2016-09-18

Fixed

• Ensure cwd is set and dest is set on app.cache.data
• Ensure the reverse of a negative flag is set on options

[0.12.0] - 2016-09-12

Added

• Adds [update-notifier][]

[0.11.0] - 2016-08-17

Fixed

• CLI: macro handling was improved

Removed

• Unused app.paths property

Bumped

• [ask-when][]
• [base-questions][]
• [generate-defaults][]
• [macro-store][]

[0.10.0] - 2016-08-09

Changed

• More improvements to user-defined template handling.
• Documentation

0.9.0 - 2016-07-12

Changed

• User-defined templates should now be stored in ~/generate/templates instead of ~/templates

Added

• common-config will be used for storing user preferences. We haven't implemented any logic around this yet, but the common-config API is exposed on the app.common property, so you can begin using it in generators.