Yeoman PowerMvc generator

PowerMvc is a Yeoman generator that adds Grunt-based front-end build stack to your ASP.NET MVC projects. Out-of-box it provides support for Bower, Sass, Require.js, live reload, CDNs, minification, bundling, source maps and revisioning. It is also integrated with MsBuild and MsDeploy. See the full list of features below.

The goal of this generator is to help people getting started with Grunt in MVC projects and to provide a good starting point to make your own front-end setup. Inspired by official webapp generator.

• NuGet package update (0.5) is coming soon
• ASP.NET vNext support is the goal for the next version

Getting Started

You need Node.js, bower, grunt and yo installed first.

• Install the generator: npm install -g generator-powermvc
• Run it in MVC project dir: yo powermvc
• Run grunt for building and grunt serve for live reloading

Commands

There are four main groups of tasks. You can create your own Grunt tasks or change existing in Gruntfile.js.

All install tasks are handled by npm and bower:

• npm install: restore all npm modules configured in package.json
• npm install {package} --save: install new Grunt plugin or other npm module and update package.json
• bower install {package} --save: install a client-side js library and update bower.json

Note that by default npm is configured to restore bower components together with npm modules (using postinstall script) for your convenience.

Grunt build task is used to automate front-end building tasks for development or production use. It can also be used to build MVC project from command line.

• grunt: runs grunt build with jshint (js validation)
• grunt build: builds all front-end stuff for development
• grunt build:proj: builds entire project (front-end and back-end)
• grunt build:proj:clean: rebuilds the project
• grunt build:dist: builds all front-end stuff for production use (minified and bundled)

Grunt serve task is used to start a web server and enable live reloading.

• grunt serve: starts the server (if IIS Express), opens the app in the browser and turns on live reloading
• grunt serve:node: starts Node.js server for html mockup with live reloading
• grunt serve:dist: starts IIS Express for dist site (minified local app)

Grunt publish task is used to preview minified/bundled local app and deploy the app to other servers.

• grunt publish: publishes the app using MsDeploy profile (dist by default)
• grunt publish:dist: builds a local copy of minified/bundled app and serves it with IIS Express

Deployment

Generator includes Properties/PowerMvc/PowerMvc.Deploy.targets file with MsBuild scripts to build release versions of all client-side files during MsDeploy execution (when publishing in Visual Studio or running the build server) and put all these files into the deployment package.

Basically MsBuild just executes npm install and grunt build:dist commands, and replaces css/js/images/html files in the deployment package by their optimized versions.

Features

Here is the list of generator features:

• Easy installation to MVC projects
• Configurable paths to all front-end dirs (css/js/images/fonts)
• Greatly optimized grunt speed with jit-grunt
• Bower integration
• Sass (LibSass) with autoprefixer
• Require.js with configured r.js optimizer and tiny almond replacement for production
• Google CDN support
• Live reload
• IIS/IIS Express servers support
• Node.js Connect server as a lightweight cross-platform alternative for html mockup hosting and live reload
• Js/css/images minification, bundling and revisioning
• Js/css source maps
• Js linting
• Automatic replace of js/css/image refs to optimized and revisioned files in html
• Optimized app preview in IIS Express
• MsBuild integration to build the project from command line
• MsDeploy integration to run grunt tasks during publishing and publish the app from command line
• Partial Mac support (all front-end tools and html mockup)
• vs.js file with Visual Studio and MVC project helpers for your own Yeoman generators

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© 2015 Pavel Nezhencev