Using Yeoman

Today I've been using Yeoman to create a AngularJS app, this is the first time I've really used Yeoman to set something up. Yeoman is a great tool, it makes getting up and running with a full feature app in minutes. Well that's the theory, I did run into some teething problems.

First this I did was use terminal to create a new directory in my working folder, something that coming from a windows background is something I'm getting use to (actually beginning to enjoy using terminal). So making a directory is as simple as going 'mkdir foldername', and that's it.

Once I did that I needed to remember to move into the new folder I've just made (an early mistake I made was not to do this, then when I ran Yeoman I had all the random folders within my working folder). Anyway now within my new folder I  ran yo angular this, according to the Yeoman site makes a AngularJS site, once yeoman has done it's thing I ran grunt test which runs through all the tests for the app.

Finally you run grunt serve which should open your lovely new site in your browser, well this is where some of my problems started. First I was getting a error in terminal telling me that grunt serve is not known, ok so looking at the Yeoman site this command was formerly grunt server which I tried and that worked. So this looks to me that my version of Yeoman is not up to date something to fix.

So my app was running, now to see if any changes I made were being shown in the browser, like LiveReload does (which for someone who was building websites over 12 years ago, live reload is amazing). I made a quick change to the standard HTML that Yeoman makes and had hoped to see my change automatically appear in the browser. That didn't happen.

Looking at terminal (my new best friend) it told me that I was getting a Bus error:10, what the hell is that. So off to Google (my second new best friend) and I found that someone else was having this similar problem. I found this blog post by Shoogle Designs, basically the post says, clear your npm cache and reinstall a stable version of Node.

That done, I tried again made a change to the HTML and went to my browser and success the change is shown, great.

So that's it all started. Basically what I've learnt from this is that Yeoman is great, you may have some problems, but it's worth sticking with and remembering back to when I started making websites, Yeoman is lightyears ahead.