simple-template-gen

🖥 Just a simple CLI to generate you code template in a easy way.

Table of contents

• Getting Started
• Creating config file
• Inserting variables
• Using variables on config file
• Using variables on template

Getting Started

To install simple-template-gen command you should use the following command on NPM:

npm install -g simple-template-gen

If you need, you can install it on your project to use in some script, just removing the -g flag.

After installing the command, you can start using it just checking it's arguments using --help flag as following:

simple-template-gen --help

This is an example of use:

simple-template-gen --config config.json --output path/to/folder

Creating config file

The config file is a JSON where the user define how the files will be exported and set the template for them. You can have more examples on examples/config folder.

This is an example of it:

{
  "folder": "MyComponent",
  "files": [
    {
      "file": "MyComponent.js",
      "template": "./folder/to/MyComponentTemplate.txt"
    },
    {
      "file": "MyComponent.md",
    },
    {
      "folder": "Documents",
      "files": [
        {
          "file": "Document1.txt"
        },
        {
          "file": "Document2.txt"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

This config file will generate the following folder structure:

MyComponent/
├── MyComponent.js (filled by template)
├── MyComponent.md
├── Documents/
│   ├── Document1.txt
│   └── Document2.txt

You can create a config file as a array to generate any folders you want on output path

[
  {
    "folder": "FolderA",
    "files": [
      {
        "file": "File1.txt"
      },
      {
        "file": "File2.txt"
      },
    ]
  },
  {
    "folder": "FolderB",
    "files": [
      {
        "file": "File3.txt"
      },
    ]
  },
  {
    "folder": "FolderC"
  }
]

This config file will generate the following folder structure:

FolderA/
├── File1.txt
├── File2.txt
FolderB/
├── File3.txt
FolderC/

Inserting variables

In this section will be described how to insert variables into exported files and config file. To set the variables that you want to apply on files, you can pass them in two ways:

The first way, you can set the variable through command line, using the -- prefix before each one, as any other argument:

simple-template-gen --config config.json --name MyComponent --type Sometype 

The other way is to create a JSON file and describe the variables on it, as you can see below:

simple-template-gen --config config.json --variables variables.json

// variables.json
 
{ 
  "name": "MyComponent",
  "type": "Sometype"
}

Using variables on config file

After inserting the variables as arguments of our command, you can use them to generate your files and inside your templates.

In the example below, you can see how it can be used on the config file, using the variables set on the last section:

// config.json
 
 
{
  "folder": "--name",
  "files": [
    {
      "file": "--name.js",
      "template": "./folder/to/MyComponentTemplate.txt"
    },
    {
      "file": "--name.md",
    },
  ]
}

This config file will generate the following folder structure:

MyComponent/
├── MyComponent.js (filled by template)
├── MyComponent.md

So as described on the example, to use your variables on config file you need to set a -- prefix to indicate that it is a variable set as command argument. In this case, we set name and type variables, that could be used on config file using --name and --type.

Using variables on template

Initially, we just set our template as a file which its content will be inserted on a certain file. Now with the variables feature, you can create a JS function on a file a use these variables to generate a customizable template, as you can see below.

simple-template-gen --config config.json --name MyComponent --packageName some-package

// config.json
 
{
  "file": "--name.js",
  "template": "./folder/to/TemplateFile.js"
}

// TemplateFile.js
 
module.exports = (variables) => (
  `
import React from 'react'
import content from '${variables.packageName}'
 
const ${variables.name} = (props) => {
  return <${variables.name} />
}
 
export default ${variables.name};
`)
 

This example will generate the following file:

// MyComponent.js
 
import React from 'react'
import content from 'some-package'
 
const MyComponent = (props) => {
  return <MyComponent />
}
 
export default MyComponent;