Kickstart, a fast and simple project template bootstrapper
Published the 2018-08-10

Ever had some code base that you regularly use to start a new project?

Until now, you've probably lost some time refactoring everything to fill out the
right project name, title etc.

A few tools already exist but either you're lost in feature bloating hell or
you're fighting to configure everything in most cases.

The following tool is an early-developement, rust-based, template tool made to
be more versatile that its closest python counter-part,
[cookiecutter](https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter).

Also, it perfectly works on Windows, Linux and MacOS without any issue!

## A demonstration

Let me demonstrate this tool from a user's point of view.

Say I'm John. I have a need to make several workers for my job queue.

All workers follow the same base structure and only a few bits of code change.
Error management is the same, etc.

Without any external tool,
the easiest way I could handle that would be to put the template in a Git
repository, clone it when needed and change the few fields,
like the handler's class name, the configuration file etc.

Still, I'd like to quickly bootstrap all my workers and not have to, by hand,
replace each key with the right value.

At the same time, I'm too lazy to set up an entire boostrapping suite or tool,
and I'd like to be able to make some very basic project templates that'd work
almost out of the box.

My example of worker system uses the following file structure
for worker classes:

```
.
├── {{name}}.java
└── template.toml
```

> Yes, this tool supports templating in file and folder names!

The `{{name}}.java` file contains the following very basic template code:

```java
package org.artemix.worker;

class {{name}} extends WorkerBase {
	public void handle(Payload payload) {
		// Some default code
	}
}
```

The `template.toml` contains a few template-specific fields (like its name,
description and configuration format version), but also variable declaration
for setup prompts.

```toml
name = "Worker"
description = "Worker base template"
kickstart_version = 1

[[variable]]
name="name"
default="MyClass"
prompt="Which class name do you want to give to your worker ?"
validation="^[A-Z]\w+$"
```

Here, with the validation regex, we can attest that we'll get a valid Java class
file starting with a capitalized letter.

And that's it!

In a few instants, we created our worker template, and we have a nice base we
can later grow if we need any new more complex worker.

*Now, how do you create a worker with this template?*

The easiest way is by simply running the following command from inside the
folder in which you want the files to be created.

```sh
$ kickstart /path/to/my/template
```

This will parse the `template.toml` inside the given template path and,
for each `[[variable]]` block, will ask the prompt, validate the input,
and repeat until it's rightly entered.

Once all prompts have been resolved, it'll copy and parse the files into the
current directory.

*But I don't want to have all my templates in local,
or pass the path every time!*

Sure, having everything in local can be bothersome,
especially if you're starting a project from a huge project template.

To answer that, in the current version, kickstart supports cloning from a git
remote by either HTTP(S), SSH or even git shortcuts!

In that sense, all the following commands are perfectly valid and will clone
from a git remote.

```
$ kickstart git@gitlab.com:MyUser/MyTemplate
$ kickstart https://git.local/test
# With git shortcuts in the configuration, see
# https://stackoverflow.com/a/25975967/10165294
$ kickstart gl:MyUser/MyTemplate
```

## In conclusion

While still young, this tool is already, as-is, really useful and can handle a
lot of situations.

Since the goal of this tool is to be as lightweight and basic as possible, you
can have a fair guarantee that it won't become an over-complex, feature-bloated,
tool.

Not every feature has been showcased in this article, so I can only recommend
you to go to the
[official Github repository](https://github.com/Keats/kickstart),
and take a look at the `README.md` file, which should contains every information
you'd need to learn how to use it.

As I publish this article, the official `v0.1.7` version have been released, and
you can find the relesae on the
[releases page](https://github.com/Keats/kickstart/releases).
If you'd prefer to be on the latest version, you can simply clone the
repository, and, while inside it, run `cargo builld` and have a working
version just for you.