Improve (or replace) the "init" task.

[cowboy]

I'd love to rewrite the init task as part of 0.5, provided I get some feedback from people. That being said, I haven't gotten much feedback. So, let's talk it out.

Here are a few ideas:

• make "are you sure?" final prompt optional - see make "are you sure?" final prompt optional #238
• allow list of prompts to be dynamically generated
• allow for arbitrary actions inside a list of prompts, or multiple lists of prompts
• standardize a way for users to install init task plugins so they don't need a custom binary to use (home dir?)
• accept options via CLI? (not sure how i feel about this)
• provide method for dynamically warning existence of files?

Any more suggestions? Here's the place to discuss them!

Also, FWIW, I'd be totally open to the main yeoman init/generate task being inlined into grunt as a replacement to init.

[cowboy]

Note to self: investigate using volo for fetching init templates.

[cowboy]

An idea, using @tbranyen's bbb as an example:

The grunt init task could pull its templates from github repos, remote tarballs, local dirs, etc. It could, given a specific command, fetch a list of commonly used templates with aliases. Probably some file that's maintained as part of the init task repo.

So if bbb were aliased to a repo or tarball, once that list of aliases is fetched, grunt init:bbb could just pull that repo or tarball down, prompt the user as-needed, and generate files. Maybe it would cache the template locally. Whatever.

And, of course, if an alias for your project wasn't merged into the official list yet, someone could always use grunt init:git://github.com/tbranyen/bbb.git or whatever. And maybe you could specify your own alias list that could override or replace entries in the official list. We'll figure those details out later.

So, this bbb init template will, in addition to generating the whole project structure, also generate a package.json that specifies grunt and a grunt-bbb plugin collection as a devDependency. Then the user just does npm install (which could be automated, of course) and they've got everything they need to start grunting their project.

You wouldn't need a custom bbb global install anymore, and people wouldn't be confused about what is and isn't grunt.

[cowboy]

So an init template would be the template itself plus a list of grunt plugins or a grunt plugin collection that template's generated code would use. It would write out package.json as part of the init process.

[leobalter]

"init remote templates"++

In time:

"accept options via CLI"++

[geddski]

Accepting options via CLI would be very useful. I'm wanting to build a node app that kicks off grunt init programmatically, passing in predefined and GUI-based options (think something like AppFog/CloudFoundry). Accepting answers to questions as CLI args would make integration with grunt a whole lot easier.