play-yeoman is a sbt+play plugin that brings the streamlined frontend development workflow and optimized build system of yeoman to Play 2.0.

In this approach, you would use play for developing the application backend/services and develop the frontend/ui using the yeoman toolchain, all in a totally integrated workflow and single unified console.

Play + Yeoman integration sbt and play plugins. Inspired and copied to quite some extent from, https://github.com/leon/play-grunt-angular-prototype

If you face any issues using this plugin, please feel free to report to | opensource [at] tuplejump [dot] com | or shout out at twitter mentioning @tuplejump or @milliondreams. You can also create a issue in the github issue tracker.

If you found a bug and fixed it, please do raise a pull request, all users will appreciate that.

If you want some new feature to be implemented, please mail us.

• This assumes that you have npm, yo, grunt and bower installed.

• If you want to use LiveReload, you should install the LiveReload plugin for your browser.

1. Create a new play project or open an existing play project

2. Add the yeoman sbt plugin to the project. Edit project/plugins.sbt to add the following line,

addSbtPlugin("com.tuplejump" % "sbt-yeoman" % "play-compatible-version")

The play-compatible-version depends on the version of Playframework being used,

3. Import Yeoman classes in the project build adding the following import to project/Build.scala,

import com.tuplejump.sbt.yeoman.Yeoman

4. In the same file, add the yeoman settings to your Play project like this,

Using 0.6.4

  val main = play.Project(appName, appVersion, appDependencies).settings(
    // Add your own project settings here
    Yeoman.yeomanSettings : _*
  )

Using >= 0.7.1

  val appSettings = Seq(version := appVersion, libraryDependencies ++= appDependencies) ++
    Yeoman.yeomanSettings 

  val main = Project(appName, file(".")).enablePlugins(play.PlayScala).settings(
    // Add your own project settings here
    appSettings: _*
  )

Using >= 0.9.0 (auto-plugin)

  val appSettings = Seq(version := appVersion, libraryDependencies ++= appDependencies) ++
    Yeoman.yeomanSettings 

  val main = Project(appName, file(".")).enablePlugins(play.PlayScala,Yeoman).settings(
    // Add your own project settings here
    appSettings: _*
  )

Note: If you're using build.sbt instead of the full scala build, you need to place the 2 additions above into build.sbt as follows:

Using 0.6.4

import com.tuplejump.sbt.yeoman.Yeoman

name := "play-project"

version := "1.0-SNAPSHOT"

libraryDependencies ++= Seq(
  javaJdbc,
  javaEbean,
  cache
)

play.Project.playJavaSettings ++ Yeoman.yeomanSettings

Using 0.7.1 or greater

import com.tuplejump.sbt.yeoman.Yeoman

name := "play-project"

version := "1.0-SNAPSHOT"

scalaVersion := "2.x.x"

lazy val root = (project in file(".")).enablePlugins(PlayScala)

Yeoman.yeomanSettings ++ Yeoman.withTemplates

Using >= 0.9.0 (auto-plugin)

lazy val root = (project in file(".")).enablePlugins(PlayScala,Yeoman)

5. Add yeoman routes to the project, appending the following line in conf/routes files,

GET     /ui         com.tuplejump.playYeoman.Yeoman.index

->	    /ui/        yeoman.Routes

Optionally, you can also redirect your root url,

GET     /           com.tuplejump.playYeoman.Yeoman.redirectRoot(base="/ui/")

Note: If using 0.8.1 and Play's injected routes generator, prefixing the route with @ will work except for yeoman.Routes. It can be used as is. This is specific to version 0.8.1. From version 0.9.0, InjectedRoutesGenerator is default.

6. Start play/sbt in your project folder,

user yo-demo> sbt

7. Update the project to pull in the new dependencies,

[yo-demo] update

8. Generate the yeoman application

[yo-demo] yo angular

9. Edit the Gruntfile.js to disable the Yeoman "connect" server as we will be using play to serve our application, This can be done by commenting out the relevant line in the server task towards the end of the file,

  grunt.registerTask('server', [
    'clean:server',
    'coffee:dist',
    'compass:server',
    'livereload-start',
    //'connect:livereload',	//THIS LINE SHOULD BE COMMENTED or REMOVED
    'open',
    'watch'
  ]);

Note: If you are using Scala Templates support in play-yeoman 0.7.1, ensure that "htmlmin" task is not called during the "build" since it does not understand Scala templates. This can be done by updating the build task in Gruntfile.js,

    grunt.registerTask('build', [
        'clean:dist',
        'bower-install',
        'useminPrepare',
        'concurrent:dist',
        'autoprefixer',
        'concat',
        'ngmin',
        'copy:dist',
        'cdnify',
        'cssmin',
        'uglify',
        'rev',
        'usemin'/*,
        'htmlmin' */
    ]);

10. Run your play application,

[yo-demo] run

11. Click on the liveReload plugin in the browser to connect and navigate to http://localhost:9000/ui/

To use Scala templates you have 2 options,

1. The old way is to create your templates in app/views and create a route for,

    GET /ui/views/{view_name}.html      controllers.Application.{your_action_handler}

2. Begining, 0.6.3, play-yeoman supports compilation of views from the yeoman directory too.

• All you have to do to enable it is add Yeoman.withTemplates settings to the app settings, so your play project will now look like this,

Using 0.6.4

  val main = play.Project(appName, appVersion, appDependencies).settings(
    // Add your own project settings here
    (Yeoman.yeomanSettings ++ Yeoman.withTemplates) : _*
  )

Using >= 0.7.1

   val appSettings = Seq(version := appVersion, libraryDependencies ++= appDependencies) ++
       Yeoman.yeomanSettings ++
       Yeoman.withTemplates
   
   val main = Project(appName, file(".")).enablePlugins(play.PlayScala).settings(
       // Add your own project settings here
      appSettings: _*
   )

Using >= 0.9.0

lazy val root = (project in file(".")).enablePlugins(PlayScala,Yeoman)

Yeoman.withTemplates

• Once that is done play will compile the templates from yeoman directory too, and you can use them in your controllers. This helps you keep all your UI files together under the yeoman directory ('ui' by default)

• Look at the yo-demo!

For versions 0.7.1 to 0.8.1, you need to run grunt prior to compile else the template code will not be generated. This is not required if you execute dist or stage directly since they have a dependency on grunt.

From 0.9.0 onwards, the views in yeoman directory are automatically compiled to generate template code.

From 0.6.3, play-yeoman updates Play's 'stage' and 'dist' tasks to depend on the grunt task. Thus you don't need any additional step putting this in production. when you run either sbt dist or sbt stage it will automatically run grunt as part of the build!

From 0.9.0, a boolean key runGruntInDist has been provided for helping with Heroku. It can be set to false and the yeoman distDirectory should be copied manually.

By default play-yeoman looks for assets in "/ui/dist" in production or "ui/app" and "ui/.tmp" in development mode. In some cases where you are not using these directories, for example you have your yeoman project in a directory other than "ui" or your dist is built at some other location, you may want to configure this.

For this purpose play-yeoman provides 2 settings that you can use in you play project's application.conf.

1. yeoman.distDir - This is a String that takes the location where yeoman/grunt build puts your web app distribution. This location will be used by play-yeoman when you are running in production i.e. after dist/stage.

2. yeoman.devDirs - This is a List of String that takes a list of locations where play-yeoman should look for files in development mode i.e. when run using sbt run.

Note: Starting from 0.7.1, it is possible to disable force option on execution of grunt tasks. This can be done by adding the following to the application build settings,

Yeoman.forceGrunt := false

This software is licensed under the Apache 2 license, quoted below.

Copyright 2013-2014 Tuplejump, Inc (http://www.tuplejump.com).

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this project except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.