Client side app workflow

Roman,

Answer for your first question, here is a guide on how to use Yeoman: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/building-apps-with-the-yeoman-workflow--net-33254

If you want to use coffeescript by default, just pass the --coffee param

yo webapp --coffee

handling the assets order you can handle from the index.html file.

When you want to get the app ready for production just type the

grunt build

that will unify and minify all of your assets and throw it all dist folder.

To customise what you have in the build process you would have to write your own or customise the grunt build task, so that it will do exactly what you want.

Hope i gave you some useful information :)

Yeomam won't get you as close to a Rails workflow as you might expect. My two cents is that you take a look at something like Middleman has it does what you want out of the box.

Yeoman way

Using generators

You can use Yeoman generators and try to find out the combination of generators that will better suit the stack you are looking for, from what you describe I might take a look at:

• webapp
• backbone
• maryo

At this point most of your requirements (both development and production) would be fulfilled:

• a well defined project structure
• compile coffeeScript and .scss
• watch and compile
• generators for model, view, collection, ...
• compile and minify all files for production

You can use multiple generators to customise your own stack, every time that Yeoman detects that a generator overwrites a existing file it will prompt what to do, and you should be able to manage the conflict by yourself. Some framework-generators will obviously clash (it wouldn't make sense to try to use a angular generator on top of backbone).

Fine tuning

You can use sub-generators to scaffold more specific parts of your app, see Addy Osmani video.

Building generators

If you feel limited by some of the choices that a generator might impose (e.g. you prefer browserify instead of requirejs) you might want to fork a generator and add that as an option. You can even build a generator form scratch that will build your custom stack!

Grunt and Bower way

Yeoman is build on top of this two, but you can opt out at any moment and build your own stack using this two. You can add your dependencies through bower, and your tasks using grunt. There are plenty of examples that can give you some guidance, you could start with Yeoman webapp. There are also good examples at github like juanghurtado/puppeteer.

There are 3 files that you must keep an eye:

• package.json — all you node dependencies go in here
• bower.json — to manage the client dependencies
• Gruntfile.js — here you define the tasks

Wrapping up

Maybe I'm stating the obvious but Yeoman does some magic work and helps you managing Grunt and bower, this magic only happens when you fully understand how this 2 work. So I would recommend that first you dive into some code and fully understand how Grunt and Bower work, and then you may use Yeoman magic.

Some other tools

You asked for some suggestions, here it goes:

• gulp.js An alternative to Grunt. More you dive into Grunt more you will want Gulp (IMHO).
• browserify An alternative to Requiere. Read this
• assemble Static site generator for Node.js, Grunt.js, and Yeoman