I'm currently experimenting with emberjs and coffee-script. So I was searching to get started using those two. Of course I stumbled across yeoman/generator-ember which seems to have coffee-script support. But this support doesn't work that well since it's hard to use it with coffee-script's sourceMap feature (see this) which is important for me. Additionally it feels like the folks from yeoman/generator-ember are more focused on getting the js thing to go which is ok. But since I want to try coffee-script I want, for example, the Gruntfile to be in coffee-script, too. So I took the time to learn about the grunt-plugins used in yeoman/generator-ember and combined them in this project without the bloat I don't need. One time this will maybe become a yeoman generator. Any contributions or tips are welcome.

Happy hacking!

$ npm install
$ bower install
$ grunt server

This launches a connect instance and mounts the application. So all you have to do is open http://localhost:3000 in your browser and start coding. After each change the page is reloaded automatically due to livereload.

.
|-- bower.json
|-- client
|   |-- coffee
|   |   |-- app.coffee
|   |   |-- models
|   |   |   `-- color.coffee
|   |   |-- routes
|   |   |   `-- index.coffee
|   |   |-- runner.coffee
|   |   `-- tests.coffee
|   |-- css
|   |   |-- runner.css
|   |   `-- style.css
|   |-- index.jade
|   `-- templates
|       |-- application.hbs
|       `-- index.hbs
|-- Gruntfile.coffee
|-- package.json
|-- public
|-- README.md
|-- src
|   |-- app.coffee
|   `-- server.coffee
`-- views

This is the source structure layed out. client/ includes everything which has to do with the client: stylesheets, coffee-scripts and the templates used in the ember application. The server sources are located in src/. Everytime you add something (stylesheet, coffee-script etc.) to your application you have to make sure to link it in your index.jade file which is the entrypoint of the application and looks like this:

doctype html
html
  head
    meta(charset='utf-8')
    title Ember Starter Kit
    if env == 'development'
      link(rel='stylesheet'
           href='bower_components/bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.css')
    else
      link(rel='stylesheet'
           href='bower_components/bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css')
    // build:css css/main.css
    link(rel='stylesheet' href='css/style.css')
    // endbuild
  body
    // build:js js/components.js
    script(src='bower_components/jquery/jquery.js')
    script(src='bower_components/handlebars/handlebars.js')
    script(src='bower_components/bootstrap/dist/js/bootstrap.js')
    // endbuild
    if env == 'development'
      script(src='bower_components/ember/ember.js')
      script(src='bower_components/ember-data/ember-data.js')
    else
      script(src='bower_components/ember/ember.min.js')
      script(src='bower_components/ember-data/ember-data.min.js')
    // build:js js/main.js
    script(src='js/templates.js')
    script(src='js/app.js')
    script(src='js/models/color.js')
    script(src='js/routes/index.js')
    // endbuild
    if env == 'development'
      // to activate the test runner, add the "?test" query string parameter
      script(src='js/runner.js')

For example to add a new model called Customer you would write your coffee-script and add the corresponding javascript file to the js block like this:

    // build:js js/main.js
    script(src='js/templates.js')
    script(src='js/app.js')
    script(src='js/models/color.js')

    // The new model
    script(src='js/models/customer.js')
    script(src='js/routes/index.js')
    // endbuild

To run your application in production mode use the following:

$ grunt build
$ NODE_ENV=production npm start

This should be enough to get started. Feel free to tweak and refine the Grunfile.coffee or anything else in this scaffold and then let me know about it via a pull request or an issue.