kickstart

A WIP equivalent of cookiecutter in Rust.

Run on examples

• cargo run -- examples/super-basic
• cargo run -- examples/rust-cli -o clicli
• cargo run -- git@github.com:Keats/kickstart-sample.git -o sample

Principle

Templates are just moving files/directories from a source to a destination but being to customise it is essential, otherwise you can just do a git clone and be done with it.

In short the most important points are:

• asking the user questions to personalize the result
• work with local folders and remote URLs (git only for now)
• a template engine with whitespace management so the result files look handwritten

Since we are only dealing with files and directories, the tool is completely language-agnostic as well.

It is very largely inspired by cookiecutter but trying to give a slightly better UX by allowing template writers to formulate questions rather than use the variable name and, later on, to have conditional questions.

For example for a server+frontend template, the questions could look like that:

- Which database do you want to use?
1. Postgres
2. MySQL
3. SQLite
4. None
Please choose from 1, 2, 3, 4 [1]: 1

- Which version of Postgres do you want to use?
1. 10.3
2. 9.6
Please choose from 1, 2 [1]: 1

- How are users going to be authenticated?
1. JWT
2. Passwords
3. None
Please choose from 1, 2 [1]: 1

- Do you want to add Sentry integration? [Y/n]: y

- Is the frontend a SPA? [y/N]: y

- Which JS framework do you want to setup?
1. React
2. Angular
3. Vue
Please choose from 1, 2, 3 [1]: 1

- Do you want to use TypeScript? [Y/n]: y

TODO

• error handling around questions
• generate tmp folder name from URL
• keep questions in order of the template.toml file: https://github.com/alexcrichton/toml-rs/issues/232
• better looking UI (colours, progress, etc)
• potentially conditional questions? some questions could be asked only if a previous value has been set to true for example
• cache remote repositories?
• Add verbose name for choices?
• make it usable as a library