yo VS http-server

Yeoman

I am familiar with Yeoman but the project appears dead. There are no replies to recent comments and the last release was a year ago. I would prefer to not use a dead/dying project as the basis for a new work. Does anyone have any suggestions?

We'll need to install the Yeoman scaffolding CLI tools as well as the generator.

Have you tried yo? Haven't tried it much so can't say for sure but it's a pretty common recommendation for project generators.

First let's install yeoman, a scaffolding tool for webapps, and yeoman's generator plugin for VSCode.

Let’s go ahead and setup our http-server, for this we will be using http-server npm package to help us with this, this is useful for static sites where we do not want to setup a node server manually.

You may need to set it up locally to be served as a local site, using something like this https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server

Once it's scraped a simple http server command could "host" it on your local machine to play: https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server

If you don't have a localhost preview server already, you can add one using the http-server package and adding a "serve" target in package.json (see example source code below).

You will see your normal build file in dist folder and a new static folder that contains your SSG files. You can then run the site by switching to the static directory and using a local server like http-server to run the compliled code.

And for the record "server" doesn't necessarily mean you need a separate computer. You can simply use a script like http-server to setup a localhost server from a folder on your computer in one command and that'd solve this problem.

If you want the finished product, I think you should either install nginx or some other “real” httpd. If having a small node package is desirable, I’d check out the http-server package.

To see our first project we need http-server

The start server task is a shell task, should run in the background and the command it executes is http-server, which is the NPM module of the same name. The presentation property is set to silent, which means that when the server starts, it doesn't pop up the terminal in Visual Studio Code. When we use background tasks, we need to define a problemMatcher that tells the debug process if the task has executed successfully or if there was any issue. This can get rather complex and you need to parse the output on the Console with Regular Expressions. In this case, we keep it very open and allow anything reported on the output Console to be a success (RegEx ".").