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Generators

A big part of Sails, like any framework, is automating repetitive tasks. Generators are no exception: they're what power the Sails command-line interface any time it generates new files for your Sails projects. In fact, you or someone on your team probably used a generator to create your latest Sails project.

When you type

sails new my-project

sails uses its built-in "new" generator to prompt you for your app template of choice, then spits out the initial folder structure for a Sails app:

my-project
  ├── api/
  │   ├─ controllers/
  │   ├─ helpers/
  │   └─ models/
  ├── assets/
  │   └─ …
  ├── config/
  │   └─ …
  ├── views/
  │   └─ …
  ├── .gitignore
  …
  ├── package.json
  └── README.md

This conventional folder structure is one of the big advantages of using a framework. But it's usually also one of the trade-offs (what if your team or organization has made firm commitments to a different set of conventions?).

Fortunately since Sails v0.11, generators are extensible and easy to check in to a project repository or publish on NPM for re-use.

Sails' generators allow you to completely customize what happens when you run sails new and sails generate from the command-line. By augmenting new apps and newly-generated modules, custom generators can be used to do all sorts of cool things:

to standardize conventions and boilerplate logic for all new apps across your organization
to swap out rules in the default .eslintrc file
to customize how the asset pipeline works in new projects
to use a different asset pipeline altogether (like Gulp or webpack)
to use a different default view engine
to automate custom deployments (e.g. white label apps with one server per customer)
to include a different set of dependencies in the package.json file
to generate files in a transpiled language like TypeScript or CoffeeScript
to start off with all documentation and comments in a language other than English
to include ASCII pictures of cats at the top of every code file (or license headers, whatever)
to standardize around a particular version of a front-end dependency (for example, sails generate jquery)
to include a particular front-end framework in your new Sails apps
to make it easy to include new Vue / React components or Angular modules from your favorite templates (for example, sails generate component or sails generate ng-module)

If you are interested in making custom generators, the best place to start is by checking out the introduction to custom generators. You also might check out open-source generators from the community, in case something already out there will save you some time.

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