I had a niche need to automate yeoman, and spent a few hours trying to overcome yeoman’s insistance on interactive prompts. As far as I can tell the prompting library, Inquirer.js, has no way to read a response file, or at least be commanded to run in non-interactive mode.

Enter an old-school POSIX friend in core-utils… yes

The yes utility continuously outputs ‘Y’ followed by a newline as long as another process is reading the stdout stream. Very convenient for piping to another program.

Here’s how I automated Yeoman to generate a new AngularJS app:

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# yeoman has a number of interactive prompts, and sadly doesn't support a batch mode
# so we use the coreutils `yes` utility to accept all the default answers in yeoman;
# yes is not part of msysgit, so skip this when running on windows without cygwin
which yes > /dev/null
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
  yes | yo angular
fi