What is Yeoman?
Yeoman is a robust and opinionated set of tools, libraries, and a workflow that can help developers quickly build beautiful, compelling web apps. It is comprised of yo - a scaffolding tool using our generator system, grunt - a task runner for your build process and bower for dependency management.
Yeoman is a tool in the Front End Scaffolding Tools category of a tech stack.
Yeoman is an open source tool with 10.1K GitHub stars and 738 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Yeoman's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Yeoman?
Companies
268 companies reportedly use Yeoman in their tech stacks, including Accenture, ViaVarejo, and Liferay.
Developers
1310 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Yeoman.
Pros of Yeoman
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Yeoman's Features
- Lightning-fast scaffolding — Easily scaffold new projects with customizable templates (e.g HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap), RequireJS and more.
- Great build process — Not only do you get minification and concatenation
- I also optimize all your image files, HTML, compile your CoffeeScript and Compass files, if you're using AMD, I will pass those modules through r.js so you don't have to.
- Automatically compile CoffeeScript & Compass — Our LiveReload watch process automatically compiles source files and refreshes your browser whenever a change is made so you don't have to.
- Automatically lint your scripts — All your scripts are automatically run against JSHint to ensure they're following language best-practices.
- Built-in preview server — No more having to fire up your own HTTP Server. My built-in one can be fired with just one command.
- Awesome Image Optimization — I optimize all your images using OptiPNG and JPEGTran so your users can spend less time downloading assets and more time using your app.
- Killer package management — Need a dependency? It's just a keystroke away. I allow you to easily search for new packages via the command-line (e.g. `bower search jquery`), install them and keep them updated without needing to open your browser.
- PhantomJS Unit Testing — Easily run your unit tests in headless WebKit via PhantomJS. When you create a new application, I also include some test scaffolding for your app.
Yeoman Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Yeoman?
Bower
Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.
Webpack
A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.
SlushJS
Slush is a scaffolding tool, i.e. a tool to help you generate new project structures to get you up and running with your new project in a matter of seconds.
npm
npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.
Yarn
Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.
