Using Yeoman With ASP.net Core

Yeoman is a code scaffolding tool that generates boilerplate project code for you. If you’ve been developing on Windows for some time, you’re probably using Visual Studio to create your projects, and letting it generate your “base” code. For the most part, if you’re still on Windows and still use Visual Studio, Yeoman may not be for you (But it’s still not totally out of the question!). If you’re on Linux, or prefer building in a minimalistic scenario using something like VS Code, then Yeoman can do a lot of the legwork for you.

Getting Started

The template we are going to use in this tutorial utilizes the bower package manager. If you don’t have this, or ff you don’t know what this is, you are going to have to install it. Run the following from a command prompt/terminal to install Bower.

npm install -g bower

Yeoman is actually an NPM module so if you haven’t already, you will need to install NodeJS from here. Once you’ve got Node up and running, you need to run the following command from a command prompt (Or terminal on non Windows), to install Yeoman globally.

npm install -g yo

Now while Yeoman is a scaffolding tool, the templates it uses to actually generate the code are mostly community driven. You can find all possible generators on this page here. While this tutorial focussesd on using Yeoman with .net core, it can be used to scaffold any codebase in any language. The generator we will be using is called “generator-aspnet”. For this, we need to install the template using NPM. So run the following in a terminal/command prompt.

npm install -g generator-aspnet

Great, now we are ready to go!

Go create a folder for your project now. Open a command prompt/terminal inside this folder and run

yo aspnet

All going well, you should be presented with a screen that is similar to this (Note it can take a while for things to kick into gear, just be patient!)

Select “Web Application” (Not Empty). On the next screen select the Bootstrap framework, type your project name in and let rip. You will see Yeoman go ahead and create your project similar to how Visual Studio would do it, you can then open up your project folder and see this :

As you probably saw, there are a tonne of templates built in to do most of the legwork of project creation for you. Have a play around creating different project types and see what is generated for you. Again, if you are using Visual Studio as your IDE, then most of this won’t be that amazing, but if you are going without, then having something to generate all this code for you is a godsend.

Using Other Templates

As quickly discussed above, this aspnet generator isn’t the only template for .net core in Yeoman. If you had over here, and type in .net core you will find several generators that can be used. Many of which are the basic template but with slight additions such as using Angular 2 instead of 1.6.

One template that is very popular is one by Microsoft called “aspnetcore-spa”. You can find out more info over on the Github page, but in short it’s a code template for creating single page apps.

Creating Your Own Templates

If you are a vendor and find yourself creating (for lack of a better term), “cookie cutter” type websites where there are many similarities, you might actually want to create your own custom template to create consistency. It’s not quite as straight forward as throwing something in a directory and having Yeoman copy/paste it, but it’s definitely worth investigating if you find yourself creating boilerplate code time and time again. You can read more in the official Yeoman docs.