Install a Generator

To test out our development environment, we should install a "generator". Generators are Node modules that tell Yeoman how to build out a project skeleton. There are hundreds of generators available. You can find a searchable index on the Yeoman website.

For our purposes, the Webapp generator will suffice. To install it, run the following command in your terminal:

npm install -g [email protected]

Remember that NPM is the package manager that came with Node. That command tells your system to install the generator-webapp module. The -g flag tells it to install the module "globally" -- so it is available to run anywhere on your system.

Once that process finished running, you will be able to generate a new project skeleton based on the generator-webapp template.

Please Note: The latest version of the generator-webapp module was recently redesigned to use a task manager called Gulp. This book will eventually be updated to catch up to the switch to Gulp but for a variety of reasons it's beneficial to stick with Grunt for now. (Grunt is still used by the other generator we will use throughout this book, the generator-angular module.)