Yeoman & RequireJS build with dynamically generated HTML?

Question

I'm trying to integrate a RequireJS setup on my front-end generated / administered by Yeoman, with the Laravel PHP framework on the backend. Everything is golden except the concatenation part of the build step in Yeoman / r.js for my javascript files.

My problem in a nut-shell: the r.js build step in Yeoman looks for an index.html file with the HTML comments like <!-- build:js scripts/amd-app.js --> around the RequireJS script tag, which kicks off the optimisation and concatenation routine in the RequireJS optimiser. However: I'm using the Laravel framework, so there is no index.html, since it is generated dynamically.

I've managed to make the process work by doing an ugly hack and adding in an index.html in the app directory file, that just has:

<!-- build:js scripts/amd-app.js -->
<script data-main="scripts/main" src="scripts/vendor/require.js"></script>
<!-- endbuild -->

Which lets Yeoman / r.js find an index.html file with the appropriate tags and filepath, do all its awesome concatenation of my AMD modules and output it into a dist directory.

Only this is a horrible hack, and I'm sure there is a much simpler of achieving the same end. I assume it has to do with editing the Gruntfile containing the Yeoman build settings to reflect the info above. I'm just not sure how :(

Anyone with some experience integrating Yeoman / RequireJS setup, with a backend framework might help? (I imagine this question applies equally to rails as well).

Answer 1

If you check (at least on Mac/linux):

/usr/local/lib/node_modules/yeoman/tasks/rjs.js

You'll see a line:

var appIndexPath  = path.resolve('mainFile' in options ? '../app/' + options.mainFile : '../app/index.html');

My guess is you can speficy another html file to kickoff the process by

rjs: {
  // no minification, is done by the min task
  optimize: 'none',
  baseUrl: './scripts',
  wrap: true,
  name: 'main'
  mainFile: 'kickoff.html'
},

Actually,

<!-- build:js scripts/amd-app.js -->

This is used by the usemin task, not rjs.

To skip the need of a html file at all, I would have to dig deeper.