Yeoman Generator for an Express + CouchDB + Backbone Node App Skeleton

Overview

This yeoman generator provides you with a node app skeleton for creating and deploying a one page dynamic html/js/css app with a node/express backend for apis or image processing or whatever. It uses a bunch web technologies to help workflow, organization and rapid development, including gulp, nodemon and Browserify.

It uses:

• Express as it's node framework.
• Backbone as it's front-end MVC.
• LESS as it's css pre-processor.
• gulp as it's task runner.
• Browserify as it's dependency manager.
• And several packages come pre-installed to help out with things (nodemon, Bootstrap, jQuery, lodash, BrowserSync, Font Awesome, async and more)

Prerequisites

First, make sure you have yeoman installed globally. npm install yo -g

Once you have that you can install this generator. npm install -g generator-node-app-skeleton

Two major things this repo uses are gulp and nodemon. You'll need to set them up globally. npm install -g gulp and npm install -g nodemon

Generating Your App

Create your project directory and cd into it: mkdir {app-dirname} && cd {app-dirname}

And run yo node-app-skeleton.

You'll get a few prompts about customizing your app.

Using Your App

There's a little bit of setup left to do before you can do everything you might need to.

Serving Your App and Listening for Changes

Run gulp start up the node server and listen for file changes. Also to compile and watch all the less, js and copies the images, fonts, and markup into a .build folder for serving using BrowserSync.

More Gulp Commands

gulp -c or gulp --clean=true will first delete the previous build folder then watch and compile.

gulp clean only cleans out your build directory.