Using generators in SailsJS 0.10.x

Sails' new release candidate is a pretty big shift from the 0.9 version, and in a good way.

What is a generator?

In Sails-land, a generator is basically a templated way to create something inside your project. If you are a Yeoman user, sails generators are analgous.

"[Generators] create new files and folders within your app based on the options and templates you provide the generator"

In previous versions of Sails, there are only built-in generators:

$ sails generate model foo

In turn, Sails would create a new file Foo.js in your api/models folder. The scaffold for the model was quite limited. Now Sails allows you to create your own custom generators for just about anything you can imagine.

How do I use custom generators?

The other day on #sailsjs, someone wanted to know how to use generators to create a model in coffeescript. I looked around, and found out that github user t3chnoboy had pushed code to support it. Unfortunately, it wasn't clear to me just exactly how to get generators and sails working together.

Make sure you have the 0.10.0-rc5 release installed globally

$ npm install -g sails@beta

This will install the latest RC of Sails globally. If you are still using 0.9.x, you can always roll-back later. (If you know how to easily switch between two versions of a globally installed npm package, please let me know!)

Create a new Sails project

$ sails new testApp && cd testApp

Install the sails-generate-model package

$ npm install --save-dev sails-generate-model

Modify your .sailsrc file to expose your project to the generator We are using a custom generator for the keyword 'model', so in our .sailsrc JSON, we need to tell Sails to use the installed package to generate models when we sails generate model <modelname>.

{
  "generators": {
    "modules": {
      "model" : "sails-generate-model"
    }
  }
}

Save that file, and use it to generate a new coffeescript model:

$ sails generate new model foo --coffee

Now if you open up your api/models folder, you should see a file Foo.coffee:

 # Foo.coffee
 #
 # @description :: TODO: You might write a short summary of how this model works and what it represents here.
 # @docs        :: http://sailsjs.org/#!documentation/models

module.exports =

  attributes: {}

Where to go from here?

npm search sails-generate is a good way to see what has been created so far.

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