Generators directory

[jahvi]

I'm trying to create my first generator for yeoman but I'm not exactly should I put it, considering I created it using yeoman init generator testing where should I place this folder?

Sorry if it's a newb question I wasn't able to find the answer anywhere 😢

[sleeper]

@sindresorhus is currently rewriting totally the generators as well as the API to use to implement a generator... I would say, wait a little bit ;)

[jahvi]

That's nice (and kind of sucks at the same time) :(

I've always been confused on how the generator development workflow should be (including unic testing and all) I'm not sure what to do exactly after yeoman init generator name

[sindresorhus]

@sleeper That's not completely correct. Sorry for not keeping you in the loop. @mklabs is rewriting the internal generator API, but the user-end generator API will stay mostly unchanged for 1.0, except for addition of a Bower dep require API.

@JavierVD See the generators docs: https://github.com/yeoman/yeoman/blob/master/docs/cli/generators.md#generators-lookup

[jahvi]

I see, I took a look at the docs but my main question about the workflow remains, basically what I'm doing now to create my test generator is:

1. yeoman init generators testing
2. Create package.json file with dependencies
3. npm install
4. Code stuff

Is this the correct way to do it?

[sindresorhus]

@mklabs

[mklabs]

@JavierVD That's petty much it 👍

You'll need to specify yeoman-generators as one of your package.json dep to be able to require it. Since it's not on npm yet, you can rely on the tarball url until it gets published: https://github.com/yeoman/generators/archive/master.tar.gz

To see if your generator is ok, you can try yeoman init --help, or directly yeoman init testing.

Hope it helps, one thing we really need to improve is the user documentation to develop custom generators.

[jahvi]

Thanks yeoman does pick it up I just wanted to make sure I was doing it right 👍

[jahvi]

Final question: how should I "install" my custom generator to run it? I mean, I can run yeoman init testing within my generator directory but I want to be able to test it out in another folder to check the output and whatnot, should I just symlink the generator folder into my global installed yeoman generators?