project init (pi)

pi is a command-line utility to initialize projects. It is written in rust.

It is intended to provide something like cookiecutter, but faster.

Reasons to use pi:

• You want to automate the process of starting a new project, in a language-agnostic way.
• You want project initialization that's quick

Reasons to use pi over cookiecutter:

• Templates are smaller. Define files you need in a .toml.
• Fast. pi 30x faster than cookiecutter when rendering the sample vim plugin template.
• pi uses mustache, a logic-less language that has libraries for many other languages.
• pi can initialize a git or mercurial repository inside your new project

Reasons to not use pi over cookiecutter:

• pi does not fetch templates remotely.
• pi uses logic-less templates, which are not as sophisticated as the jinja templates that cookiecutter uses.
• pi is a work in progress. It does not yet have custom keys.

Cool benchmarks (with Haskell's bench):

Installation

Binary releases

You can find binaries for x64 linux, ARM linux, and x64-windows on the release page.

Cargo

First, install cargo. Then:

 $ cargo install project_init

Use

The easiest way to use pi is with the builtin templates:

$ pi new haskell new-project
Finished initializing project in new-project/

For a custom template:

$ pi init path/to/template/dir/ new-project
Finished initializing project in new-project/

Note that you can put templates in $HOME/.pi_templates and they can then be called from anywhere.

For template examples, check out pi-templates.

Configuration

Global configuration is via the ~/.pi.toml file. The following is an example:

license = "BSD3"
version_control = "git"
version = "0.1.0"

[author]
name = "Vanessa McHale"
email = "vamchale@gmail.com"
github_username = "vmchale"

Project-specific config lives in $PROJECT_NAME/template.toml. The following is an example for a vim plugin:

license = "BSD3"
with_readme = true

[files]
files = ["syntax/{{ project }}.vim","plugin/{{ project }}.vim","doc/{{ project }}.txt"] # blank files
directories = ["doc","syntax","plugin"]
templates = ["vimball.txt"] # files to be processed

[config]
version = "0.1.0"
version_control = "git"

Templates

pi uses mustache for templating, via the rustache crate.

You can find examples and help on the mustache page.