Workaround for Yeoman generators not producing .gitignore files due to Yeoman issue #1862

.gitignore

@@ -29,3 +29,10 @@ project.lock.json
 .vs/
 npm-debug.log
 /.build/
+
+# The templates can't contain their own .gitignore files, because Yeoman has strange default handling for
+# files with that name (https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/1862). So, each template instead has a template_gitignore
+# file which gets renamed after the files are copied. And so any files that need to be excluded in the source
+# repo have to be excluded here.
+/templates/*/node_modules/
+/templates/*/wwwroot/dist/

templates/yeoman/src/build/build.ts

@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ import * as _ from 'lodash';
 import * as mkdirp from 'mkdirp';
 import * as rimraf from 'rimraf';
 
-const textFileExtensions = ['.gitignore', '.config', '.cs', '.cshtml', 'Dockerfile', '.html', '.js', '.json', '.jsx', '.md', '.ts', '.tsx', '.xproj'];
+const textFileExtensions = ['.gitignore', 'template_gitignore', '.config', '.cs', '.cshtml', 'Dockerfile', '.html', '.js', '.json', '.jsx', '.md', '.ts', '.tsx', '.xproj'];
 
 const templates = {
     'angular-2': '../../templates/Angular2Spa/',
@@ -38,7 +38,10 @@ function writeFileEnsuringDirExists(root: string, filename: string, contents: st
 }
 
 function listFilesExcludingGitignored(root: string): string[] {
-    let gitIgnorePath = path.join(root, '.gitignore');
+    // Note that the gitignore files, prior to be written by the generator, are called 'template_gitignore'
+    // instead of '.gitignore'. This is a workaround for Yeoman doing strange stuff with .gitignore files
+    // (it renames them to .npmignore, which is not helpful).
+    let gitIgnorePath = path.join(root, 'template_gitignore');
     let gitignoreEvaluator = fs.existsSync(gitIgnorePath)
         ? gitignore.compile(fs.readFileSync(gitIgnorePath, 'utf8'))
         : { accepts: () => true };

templates/yeoman/src/generator/app/index.ts

@@ -47,6 +47,11 @@ class MyGenerator extends yeoman.Base {
             // Token replacement in filenames
             let outputFn = fn.replace(/tokenreplace\-([^\.\/]*)/g, (substr, token) => this._answers[token]);
 
+            // Rename template_gitignore to .gitignore in output
+            if (path.basename(fn) === 'template_gitignore') {
+                outputFn = path.join(path.dirname(fn), '.gitignore');
+            }
+
             this.fs.copyTpl(
                 path.join(templateRoot, fn),
                 this.destinationPath(outputFn),

templates/yeoman/src/generator/package.json

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 {
   "name": "generator-aspnetcore-spa",
-  "version": "0.1.5",
+  "version": "0.1.6",
   "description": "Single-Page App templates for ASP.NET Core",
   "author": "Microsoft",
   "license": "Apache-2.0",