plant-cli

Plant

CLI for quick, opinionated creation of typescript projects.

After finding myself going through the same process of creating and modifying boilerplates over and over again, I have reached a conclusion that I'm wasting too much of my time on bootstrapping projects, rather than working on them: Whether it's because of tools which require too much configuration (such as babel or webpack) or tools which "opinions" differ from mine (such as create-react-app) which I then have to hack upon.

That's where plant comes into play - this is a tool that's like a macro runner more than anything else: it has a very clear and extensible DSL that handles everything from basic i/o operations to domain-specific actions, such as npm install.

Feel free to contribute by either PRing, forking, altering and adding different macros and recipes.

Install

Install globally using npm:

$ npm install -g plant-cli

Usage

Create an empty project directory, and within it run the following command:

$ plant [recipe]

Where [recipe] is the name of the foundation from which you want to create your project. This is an optional parameter, and if omitted, defaults to vanilla - which is the most basic project.

Available Recipes

The following recipes are built in and ready to use out of the box:

• vanilla: Basic zero-conf typescript project, which initializes a git repo and uses jest for testing

  Typescript, Jest, TSLint

• electron: Electron application with react, typescript, jest and sass modules, powered by the parcel bundler

  Typescript, Jest, TSLint, React, Parcel, SASS, Electron, Electron-Builder

• express: Express-only application which utilizes json as body parser

  Express, Typescript, Jest

• react-component: React component library that is not a standalone project

  React, Parcel, Jest, Typescript, TSLint

• react-express: Fullstack React & Express application with typescript, jest and sass modules

  React, Create-React-App, SASS, Express, TSLint

• react-native: React Native application with typescript, sass and jest

  React Native, SASS, Typescript, TSLint

• react-nodegui: React-NodeGUI application with typescript, jest and sass, powered by the parcel bundler (experimental)

  Typescript, Jest, TSLint, React, Parcel, NodeGUI, SASS

• react-parcel: React application with typescript, jest and sass modules, powered by the parcel bundler

  Typescript, Jest, TSLint, React, Parcel, SASS

• react: React application with typescript, jest and sass modules

  React, Create-React-App, SASS

Extending plant

plant DSL is composed of the following groups of entities:

• utils: basic, un-opinionated operations (e.g: readFile)
• actions: domain-specific atomic operations (e.g npmInstall)
• fragments: composition of actions that serve a specific purpose (e.g add express to project)
• recipes: composition of fragments which produce a working boilerplate project

Adding utils and actions

Adding a util, an action or a fragment is straight forward - just look at the existing code and add your own in the same flavour.

Adding Fragments

Fragments work very much like utils and actions, with a small addition: a fragment can export a tags variable, which holds an array of string tags representing the components of this fragment. For example, the add-react-with-parcel fragment exports react, parcel and sass, as those three components are added by this fragment.

Fragment tags are then collected and displayed in the README, under the recipes which use said fragments.

Adding recipes

plant recognizes everything in the recipes directory as a recipe, its name being its filename. As it addresses recipes by name, recipe files should maintain the RecipeType interface (found in recipe.ts) where they export two functions:

1. recipe(): Promise<void> - the recipe routine that is called by the recipes runner and either resolves or aborts using the terminate() util.

2. description(): string - a description of the recipe, used to compose this README file.

Adding Fragments

Adding a util, an action or a fragment is straight forward - just look at the existing code and add your own in the same flavour.

Refer to one of the existing recipes for examples.

Contribution

Contributions are welcome! If you want to submit a pull request, please do.

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