Trick question. It's not a thing. It's this guy:
Basically, he wears a top hat, lives in your computer, and waits for you to tell him what kind of application you wish to create.
Not every new computer comes with a Yeoman pre-installed. He lives in the npm package repository. You only have to ask for him once, then he packs up and moves into your hard drive. Make sure you clean up, he likes new and shiny things.
npm install -g yo
Yeoman travels light. He didn't pack any generators when he moved in. You can think of a generator like a plug-in. You get to choose what type of application you wish to create, such as a Backbone application or even a Chrome extension.
To install generator-liveoak from npm, run:
npm install -g generator-liveoak
The liveoak-generator is used to quickly scaffold a simple LiveOak (chat) application, very similar to the LiveOak liveoak-example-chat-html example. It's using many LiveOak features OOTB, like the storage and subscriptions. To scaffold new project, just create a new directory, access it and run:
yo liveoak myApp
You'll be prompted to provide the host and port of your LiveOak server. If you're running the server on your localhost, just press enter and the default value http://localhost:8080
will be used. This will create new Angular.JS based LiveOak project called myApp
. You can initialize the project without the application name, like:
yo liveoak
In that case, the name of the current folder will be used as the application name.
After the initialization you need to create an application with the same name in LiveOak. Creating a basic application with default settings is recommended for this newly created project to operate correctly.
To start the actual application, simply run:
grunt serve
This will start the Node.JS web server hosting your application and start a web browser, opening the application. If you want to host the application directly on the LiveOak server, you need to build it first with:
grunt build
After the build process you'll be able to locally import the application directory to the LiveOak server or you can even push it to github and import from there. The build process is basically a rip-off of the generator-angular. It minimize and concat the js and css files and make the whole project ready for production. Visit the generator project page to learn more.
Yeoman has a heart of gold. He's a person with feelings and opinions, but he's very easy to work with. If you think he's too opinionated, he can be easily convinced.
If you'd like to get to know Yeoman better and meet some of his friends, Grunt and Bower, check out the complete Getting Started Guide.
MIT