yeoman: automatically install npm modules

Question

I've created a yeoman generator.

Once I've created a project scaffold using my generator, I run the command "npm install grunt-contrib-watch grunt-contrib-connect"

I've been following the doc here: http://yeoman.io/generators.html

It seems to indicate that npm dependencies can be installed automatically. But I can't quiet figure out how to make this happen.

So, how do I define npm depencies in my generator, so that the node modules get installed automatically when the scaffold gets created?

Answer 1

You can generate a package.json as part of your scaffolding just as any other file. It can even contain template markup, as in generator-webapp.

If you scaffold out a package.json in the root directory of your generated project, you can run installDependencies() of the generator object at the end:

this.on('end', function () {
  this.installDependencies();
});

This will take care of installing bower and npm dependencies that the project declares.