My Experience with JHipster

When I saw this informative post about JHipster I couldn't wait to try it out. Features like security, persistence, responsive UI, efficient monitoring, ability to change log level at runtime and much more - all granted for free, no effort whatsoever. Amazing stuff, and it worked... almost. I ended up spending a day trying to brew my perfect app. Well, let me tell you there have been a lot of waiting time and errors. Even though I am not sure if I am ready to use the tool for real I wanted to share my experience. Never mind the time and effort, some of the problems were, as usual, my own fault and made me fix my environment.

 First of all, I recommend resolving npm permissions, so that you can avoid using sudo when installing npm modules. Check this video, there are several options mentioned in it. Here is what worked for me:
 $ whoami  
 tom  
 $ sudo chown -R tom /usr/local/lib/node_modules  
 $ sudo chown -R tom /usr/local/bin  
 $ sudo chown -R tom /usr/local/share  
 $ npm config set prefix /Users/tom/npm-global
Note that the last command will fail if you happen to have the prefix already set. If that's the case remove the existing prefix by running:
 $ npm --prefix="" set prefix ""
Don't forget to update the PATH variable, in ~/.bash_profile:
 export PATH="/Users/tom/npm-global/bin:${PATH}"
Finally, ensure that you are the owner of ~/.npm directory. 
 $ sudo chown -R tom ~/.npm
Strange as it sounds, some of the content in that directory was in my case owned by root. That caused issues later on and my project couldn't be generated without errors.

Restart your terminal and you are good to go.

Next, install everything as per the JHipster tutorial. Here is what I have:

#1 Java
 $ java -version  
 java version "1.8.0_25"  
 Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_25-b17)

#2 Maven
 $ mvn -version  
 Apache Maven 3.2.5

#3 Git
 $ git --version  
 git version 1.9.3 (Apple Git-50)

#4 Node.js + npm
 $ node -v  
 v0.12.2  
 $ npm -v  
 2.7.4

#5 Yeoman
 $ yo --version  
 1.4.6

#6 Bower
 $ bower --version  
 1.4.1

#7 Grunt CLI
 $ grunt --version  
 grunt-cli v0.1.13

#8 JHipster Generator
 $ npm list -g --depth=0 | grep jhipster  
 ├── generator-jhipster@2.7.0

In the next step, create an application directory and start the generator. My sample app is called simply myapp:
 $ mkdir myapp && cd $_ && yo jhipster

Provide the required information. I opted for MongoDB and stateless authentication as I wanted to have an app which would scale well:

Now just wait until the generator completes. Beware it may take quite some time. Pay attention to errors and resolve them individually. An awful lot of files is being downloaded and you need a solid network connection. Even then though, some of the dependencies can (and will!) fail to download.

Hopefully, at some point, you get to see a successful build:
In your project directory run grunt and then start the app by running mvn spring-boot:run

Now comes the confusing part. Initially, the app loaded as expected. Seeing the fully functioning UI is a very rewarding experience and I find the features impressive. 

On the other hand, it all feels rather fragile. For instance, the app was successfully started the very first time. Upon subsequent restarts, and I swear I hadn't changed a single line of code (!), I started to see errors. Typically, AngularJS wouldn't load or there were failing modules etc. I tried rebuilding the project, but that didn't help. All in all, the UI breaks very easily and it's not too obvious what exactly went wrong. 

I haven't given up just yet and continue experimenting. I will post an update if I manage to solve the remaining issues. Stay tuned.