We’re thrilled to announce the relaunch of Yeoman’s maintenance for 2025. The new maintainers team, @UlisesGascon and @JoshuaKGoldberg, are stepping in to ensure this beloved project continues to thrive as a stable, reliable tool for developers.
A Look Back at Yeoman
Yeoman (or “yo”) has been a cornerstone of web development tooling for over a decade.
First released in 2012 by the Chrome DevRel team, Yeoman provides a robust workflow and tools for managing templates, known as “generators.” Its iconic top-hat logo has become one of the most recognizable symbols in open-source development. 🎩❤️
In its heyday, Yeoman introduced developers to powerful ways of generating project templates, paving the way for tools like Create React App. Though no longer at the cutting edge of web tooling, Yeoman remains a valuable resource for developers seeking a stable and proven solution.
Why Relaunch Maintenance?
Yeoman has always been a community-driven project. Over the years, it has gone through cycles of active development and quieter periods, depending on the availability of volunteer maintainers.
Yeoman is still actively used by many projects such as JHipster and VS Code’s extension development starter. After some sporadic updates in recent years, we’re now prioritizing stability, ensuring Yeoman can remain a dependable tool for legacy projects and those who continue to benefit from its features.
Maintenance Goals for 2025
The focus for this maintenance phase is stability, not feature development. With limited resources, we aim to address core issues and improve the experience for both contributors and users. Here’s what’s on our roadmap:
Core Priorities
- Tidy Up Backlogs
Triage outstanding issues and pull requests across Yeoman’s repositories. - Documentation and Tooling Updates
Modernize contributing guidelines and development practices to make it easier for others to get involved. - Dependency Updates
Upgrade dependencies, replacing deprecated packages as necessary. - Bug Fixes
Release quality-of-life updates to resolve outstanding issues and improve platform support.
What’s Next?
Here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming soon:
- Governance and Security
We’re formalizing governance and security processes to ensure long-term sustainability. - Public Communication
We’ll launch a Discord community and update the Yeoman website to reflect current priorities. - Better Contribution Flows
Updated labels, tooling, and workflows will make it easier for contributors to engage with the project. - Testing Releases
We’ll publish some non-feature releases to test our updated pipelines.
For more details, see the full announcement on GitHub.
Scope of Work
Our primary focus will be on maintaining key Yeoman projects like yo, generator-generator, and yeoman-test, among others. At the same time, some older, less relevant projects will be deprecated to streamline maintenance.
For a full list of the repositories in scope, check out our maintenance plan on GitHub issue #1779.
A Word on Finances
Thanks to our supporters, Yeoman has funds held through Open Collective. While we don’t plan to allocate these funds immediately, they’ll support the project’s future sustainability, including through platforms like Tidelift.
Join the Community!
We’d love to hear from you! If you have ideas, feedback, or just want to cheer us on, we invite you to join our community on Discord! Let’s keep Yeoman alive and thriving in 2025 and beyond. 🎉
Looking Ahead
We’re excited about this new chapter for Yeoman. While we aren’t introducing major new features, we’re committed to ensuring Yeoman remains a solid, dependable tool for developers who rely on it.
Stay tuned for updates, and thank you for being part of the Yeoman community! ❤️
– The Yeoman Maintainers Team
@UlisesGascon and @JoshuaKGoldberg