AngularJS generator

Yeoman generator for AngularJS - lets you quickly set up a project with sensible defaults and best practices.

There are many starting points for building a new Angular single page app, in addition to this one. To see a comparison of the popular options, have a look at this comparison.

Roadmap for upcoming plans/features/fixes

Usage

For step-by-step instructions on using Yeoman and this generator to build a TODO AngularJS application from scratch see this tutorial.

Install yo, grunt-cli, bower, generator-angular and generator-karma:

npm install -g grunt-cli bower yo generator-karma generator-angular

If you are planning on using Sass, you will need to first install Ruby and Compass:

Install Ruby by downloading from here or use Homebrew
Install the compass gem:

gem install compass

Make a new directory, and cd into it:

mkdir my-new-project && cd $_

Run yo angular, optionally passing an app name:

yo angular [app-name]

Run grunt for building and grunt serve for preview

Generators

Available generators:

angular (aka angular:app)
angular:controller
angular:directive
angular:filter
angular:route
angular:service
angular:provider
angular:factory
angular:value
angular:constant
angular:decorator
angular:view

App

Sets up a new AngularJS app, generating all the boilerplate you need to get started. The app generator also optionally installs Bootstrap and additional AngularJS modules, such as angular-resource (installed by default).

Example:

yo angular

Route

Generates a controller and view, and configures a route in app/scripts/app.js connecting them.

Example:

yo angular:route myroute

Produces app/scripts/controllers/myroute.js:

angular.module('myMod').controller('MyrouteCtrl', function ($scope) {
  // ...
});

Produces app/views/myroute.html:

<p>This is the myroute view</p>

Explicitly provide route URI

Example:

yo angular:route myRoute --uri=my/route

Produces controller and view as above and adds a route to app/scripts/app.js with URI my/route

Controller

Generates a controller in app/scripts/controllers.

Example:

yo angular:controller user

Produces app/scripts/controllers/user.js:

angular.module('myMod').controller('UserCtrl', function ($scope) {
  // ...
});

Directive

Generates a directive in app/scripts/directives.

Example:

yo angular:directive myDirective

Produces app/scripts/directives/myDirective.js:

angular.module('myMod').directive('myDirective', function () {
  return {
    template: '<div></div>',
    restrict: 'E',
    link: function postLink(scope, element, attrs) {
      element.text('this is the myDirective directive');
    }
  };
});

Filter

Generates a filter in app/scripts/filters.

Example:

yo angular:filter myFilter

Produces app/scripts/filters/myFilter.js:

angular.module('myMod').filter('myFilter', function () {
  return function (input) {
    return 'myFilter filter:' + input;
  };
});

View

Generates an HTML view file in app/views.

Example:

yo angular:view user

Produces app/views/user.html:

<p>This is the user view</p>

Service

Generates an AngularJS service.

Example:

yo angular:service myService

Produces app/scripts/services/myService.js:

angular.module('myMod').service('myService', function () {
  // ...
});

You can also do yo angular:factory, yo angular:provider, yo angular:value, and yo angular:constant for other types of services.

Decorator

Generates an AngularJS service decorator.

Example:

yo angular:decorator serviceName

Produces app/scripts/decorators/serviceNameDecorator.js:

angular.module('myMod').config(function ($provide) {
    $provide.decorator('serviceName', function ($delegate) {
      // ...
      return $delegate;
    });
  });

Options

In general, these options can be applied to any generator, though they only affect generators that produce scripts.

CoffeeScript and TypeScript

For generators that output scripts, the --coffee option will output CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript, and --typescript will output TypeScript instead of JavaScript.

For example:

yo angular:controller user --coffee

Produces app/scripts/controller/user.coffee:

angular.module('myMod')
  .controller 'UserCtrl', ($scope) ->

For example:

yo angular:controller user --typescript

Produces app/scripts/controller/user.ts:

/// <reference path="../app.ts" />

'use strict';

module demoApp {
    export interface IUserScope extends ng.IScope {
        awesomeThings: any[];
    }
    
    export class UserCtrl {

        constructor (private $scope:IUserScope) {
	        $scope.awesomeThings = [
              'HTML5 Boilerplate',
              'AngularJS',
              'Karma'
            ];
        }
    }
}

angular.module('demoApp')
  .controller('UserCtrl', demoApp.UserCtrl);

Minification Safe

tl;dr: You don't need to write annotated code as the build step will handle it for you.

By default, generators produce unannotated code. Without annotations, AngularJS's DI system will break when minified. Typically, these annotations that make minification safe are added automatically at build-time, after application files are concatenated, but before they are minified. The annotations are important because minified code will rename variables, making it impossible for AngularJS to infer module names based solely on function parameters.

The recommended build process uses ng-annotate, a tool that automatically adds these annotations. However, if you'd rather not use it, you have to add these annotations manually yourself. Why would you do that though? If you find a bug in the annotated code, please file an issue at ng-annotate.

Add to Index

By default, new scripts are added to the index.html file. However, this may not always be suitable. Some use cases:

Manually added to the file
Auto-added by a 3rd party plugin
Using this generator as a subgenerator

To skip adding them to the index, pass in the skip-add argument:

yo angular:service serviceName --skip-add

Bower Components

The following packages are always installed by the app generator:

angular
angular-mocks

The following additional modules are available as components on bower, and installable via bower install:

angular-animate
angular-aria
angular-cookies
angular-messages
angular-resource
angular-sanitize

All of these can be updated with bower update as new versions of AngularJS are released.

json3 and es5-shim have been removed as Angular 1.3 has dropped IE8 support and that is the last version that needed these shims. If you still require these, you can include them with: bower install --save json3 es5-shim. wiredep should add them to your index.html file but if not you can manually add them.

Configuration

Yeoman generated projects can be further tweaked according to your needs by modifying project files appropriately.

Output

You can change the app directory by adding an appPath property to bower.json. For instance, if you wanted to easily integrate with Express.js, you could add the following:

{
  "name": "yo-test",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  ...
  "appPath": "public"
}

This will cause Yeoman-generated client-side files to be placed in public.

Note that you can also achieve the same results by adding an --appPath option when starting generator:

yo angular [app-name] --appPath=public

Testing

Running grunt test will run the unit tests with karma.

Contribute

See the contributing docs

When submitting an issue, please follow the guidelines. Especially important is to make sure Yeoman is up-to-date, and providing the command or commands that cause the issue.

When submitting a PR, make sure that the commit messages match the AngularJS conventions.

When submitting a bugfix, write a test that exposes the bug and fails before applying your fix. Submit the test alongside the fix.

When submitting a new feature, add tests that cover the feature.