generate-updatefile

Generate an updatefile.js in the current working directory or specified --dest.

Table of Contents

• What is "Generate"?
• Command line usage
  • Install
  • Run
  • Help
• CLI Usage
  • Running tasks
  • Available tasks
• API usage
  • Install locally
  • Use as a plugin
  • Register as a generator
• Running multiple generators
  • generate-install
  • generate-dest
• Customization
  • Destination directory
  • Overriding templates
• Next steps
• About
  • Related projects
  • Contributing
  • Running tests
  • Author
  • License

(TOC generated by verb using markdown-toc)

What is "Generate"?

Generate is a command line tool and developer framework for scaffolding out new GitHub projects using generators and tasks. Answers to prompts and the user's environment can be used to determine the templates, directories, files and contents to build. Support for gulp, base and assemble plugins, and much more.

For more information about Generate:

• Visit the generate project
• Visit the generate documentation
• Find generators on npm (help us author generators)

Command line usage

Install

Installing the CLI

To run the updatefile generator from the command line, you'll need to install generate globally first. You can do that now with the following command:

$ npm install --global generate

This adds the gen command to your system path, allowing it to be run from any directory.

Install generate-updatefile

You may now install this module with the following command:

$ npm install --global generate-updatefile

Run

You should now be able to run generate-updatefile with the following command:

$ gen updatefile

What will happen?

Running $ gen updatefile will run the generator's default task, which will:

1. prompt you for any information that's missing
2. render the necessary template(s) using your answers
3. write the resulting files to the current working directory

What you should see in the terminal

If completed successfully, you should see both starting and finished events in the terminal, like the following:

[00:44:21] starting ...
...
[00:44:22] finished ✔

If you do not see one or both of those events, please let us know about it.

Help

To see a general help menu and available commands for Generate's CLI, run:

$ gen help

CLI Usage

Running tasks

Tasks on generate-updatefile are run by passing the name of the task to run after the generator name, delimited by a comma:

$ gen updatefile:foo
       ^       ^
generator     task

Example

The following will run generator foo, task bar:

$ gen foo:bar

Default task

When a task name is not explicitly passed on the command line, Generate's CLI will run the default task.

Available tasks

updatefile

Generate an updatefile.js file to the current working directory.

Example

$ gen updatefile
$ gen updatefile --dest ./docs

Visit Generate's documentation for tasks.

API usage

Use generate-updatefile as a plugin in your own generator.

Install locally

Install with npm:

$ npm install --save generate-updatefile

Use as a plugin

When used as a plugin, tasks from generate-updatefile are added to your generator's instance.

module.exports = function(app) {
  app.use(require('generate-updatefile'));
  // do generator stuff
};

Running tasks

You can now run any tasks from generate-updatefile as if they were part of your own generator.

module.exports = function(app) {
  app.use(require('generate-updatefile'));
 
  app.task('foo', function(cb) {
    // do task stuff
    cb();
  });
 
  // run the `mit` task from `generate-updatefile`
  app.task('default', ['foo', 'mit']);
};

Register as a generator

When registered as a generator, tasks from generate-updatefile are added to the "namespace" you give to the generator.

module.exports = function(app) {
  app.register('foo', require('generate-updatefile'));
  // generate
};

Running tasks

Pass the names of one or more tasks to run to the .generate method, prefixed with the namespace of the sub-generator (foo, in our example):

Examples

Run the bar task from generator foo:

module.exports = function(app) {
  app.register('foo', require('generate-updatefile'));
 
  app.generate('foo:bar', function(err) {
    if (err) console.log(err);
  });
};

Wrap the call to .generate in a task, so it can be called on demand:

module.exports = function(app) {
  app.register('foo', require('generate-updatefile'));
 
  app.task('bar', function(cb) {
    app.generate('foo:bar', cb);
  });
};

More information

Visit the generator docs to learn more about creating, installing, using and publishing generators.

Running multiple generators

Generate supports running multiple generators at once. Here are some examples of other generators that work well with generate-updatefile.

generate-install

Run generate-install after this generator to prompt to install any dependencies or devDependencies necessary for the generated files.

Example

generate-dest

Run generate-dest before this generator to prompt for the destination directory to use for generated files.

Example

Customization

The following instructions can be used to override settings in generate-updatefile. Visit the Generate documentation to learn about other ways to override defaults.

Destination directory

To customize the destination directory, install generate-dest globally, then in the command line prefix dest before any other generator names.

For example, the following will prompt you for the destination path to use, then pass the result to generate-updatefile:

$ gen dest updatefile

Overriding templates

You can override a template by adding a template of the same name to the templates directory in user home.

For example, to override the foo.tmp template, add a template at the following path ~/generate/generate-updatefile/templates/foo.tmpl, where ~/ is the user-home directory that os.homedir() resolves to on your system.

Next steps

• docs.md: additional documentation for this generator
• Generate documentation: visit the Generate docs
• Generate repo: visit the Generate repository

About

Related projects

• assemble: Get the rocks out of your socks! Assemble makes you fast at creating web projects… more | homepage
• generate: Command line tool and developer framework for scaffolding out new GitHub projects. Generate offers the… more | homepage
• update: Be scalable! Update is a new, open source developer framework and CLI for automating updates… more | homepage

Contributing

Pull requests and stars are always welcome. For bugs and feature requests, please create an issue.

Running tests

Install dev dependencies:

$ npm install -d && npm test

Author

Jon Schlinkert

• github/jonschlinkert
• twitter/jonschlinkert

License

Copyright © 2016, Jon Schlinkert. Released under the MIT license.

This file was generated by verb, v0.9.0, on July 15, 2016.