Generating a Volto 18 alpha project

It’s just Yeomen, but it has its quirks. This is for 18.0.0-alpha.25, but should work for other 18 alpha versions as well.

Preparation

We need a Node.js environment. I use nvm to manage my Node.js versions. I have Node.js 20 (current) installed.

nvm install --lts
nvm use --lts

Additionally we need to enable corepack.

corepack enable

Installing Yeoman

Ok, I do not want to install Yeoman globally, so I use an empty package JSON to trick npm to install Yeoman locally. Long time ago I put ./node_modules/.bin into my PATH, so I can run local binaries.

mkdir PATH/TO/PROJECT_BASE
cd PATH/TO/PROJECT_BASE
echo "{}" > package.json
yarn add yo

Note: this installs the generating node modules into node_modules in the current directory PATH/TO/PROJECT_BASE. Further on I will use PATH/TO/PROJECT_BASE/frontend as the directory for the volto-project itself.

Installing the Volto generator

Here I install the Volto generator @plone/generator-volto. Since I want to use the alpha of Volto 18, I need to be specific about the version. This needs the 9-alpha of the Volto generator.

yarn add @plone/generator-volto@9.0.0-alpha.14

Generating the project

Finally we can generate the project. We need to pass the exact version of Volto we want to use.

Yoemen is located in the parent directory, so we need to use the path to the binary.

yo @plone/volto PROJECT-frontend --volto=18.0.0-alpha.25

The Volto generator will ask you some questions. Answer them and the project will be generated.

cd PROJECT-frontend

Building the project

A Makefile is generated. It’s broken, so ignore it for now.

yarn install

The project is ready to be started:

yarn start