So I’ve played around with Yeoman.
And I’ve played with NPM, Gulp, and Grunt.
There’s lots of things I like about these tools. But one thing that I dislike about all of them is the general difficulty of building your own customized website scaffolding system with them. And there’s an over-abundance of dependencies in my opinion. So back to the shell I say!
Here’s some of my own shell scripts (Bash flavored) to quickly scaffold out common site structures I use frequently.
Generic Scaffold (.NET 4 MVC approach)
scaffold()
{
echo “Creating Content directory”
mkdir Content
echo “Creating Scripts directory”
mkdir Scripts
echo “Moving into Content directory”
cd Content
echo “Creating assets folder for theme”
mkdir assets
echo “Moving into Content/assets directory”
cd assets
echo “Making css, fonts, and img directories”
mkdir css
mkdir fonts
mkdir img
echo “And heading back out to the root directory”
cd ../..
}
Bootstrap Scaffold (.NET 4 MVC approach)*
*Uses Bower to handle front-end dependencies
scaffold-bootstrap()
{
echo “Creating Content directory”
mkdir Content
echo “Creating Scripts directory”
mkdir Scripts
echo “Moving into Content directory”
cd Content
echo “Creating assets folder for theme”
mkdir assets
echo “Moving into Content/assets directory”
cd assets
echo “Making css, fonts, and img directories”
mkdir css
mkdir fonts
mkdir img
echo “Using Bower to download front-end dependencies”
echo “Using Bower to install jQuery#1 – latest”
bower install jquery#1
echo “Using Bower to install Bootstrap”
bower install bootstrap
echo “Using Bower to install FontAwesome”
bower install fontawesome
echo “Using Bower to install animate.css”
bower install animate.css
echo “Moving things into place…”
cd bower_components/animate.css
rsync -r animate.min.css ../../css
cd ../bootstrap/dist
cd css
rsync -r bootstrap.min.css ../../../../css
cd ../fonts
rsync -r * ../../../../fonts
cd ../js
rsync -r bootstrap.min.js ../../../../../../Scripts
cd ../../../font-awesome/css
rsync -r font-awesome.min.css ../../../css
cd ../fonts
rsync -r * ../../../fonts
cd ../../jquery/dist
rsync -r jquery.min.js ../../../../../Scripts
echo “And heading back out to the root directory”
cd ../..
}
I’ve added these scripts to my Bash profile (.bash_profile in your user account). For more info on bash scripting, see http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html or use your favorite web search engine.
I’ll probably create a deployment-preparation script to copy the appropriate files/directories into a deployment folder for build/deployment. Anyway, I found Bash much easier to use to setup my web project scaffolding in the way I want it to be.
Update: Welp here’s a real world reason to go with shell scripts and minimize your external dependencies: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/rage-quit-coder-unpublished-17-lines-of-javascript-and-broke-the-internet/