Show HN: Scaffolder, CLI tool to generate project structure, taken from YAML

#1

Post by cemister » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:48 AM UTC

Scaffolder is a CLI tool written in Golang to instantly generate skeleton project structure with boilerplate code, that's taken from configurable YAML file, to quickly kick-start your project

I was tired of manually creating the project structure, with all those folder, files... So I decided to create a CLI tool that allows you to instantly generate skeleton projects, based on a reusable YAML file with boilerplate code if specified.

YAML is very easy for both humans and programs to work with and parse, hence why it's the most logical choice in context of Scaffolder.

Check out the GitHub page for detailed description and examples :)

Show HN: Scaffolder, CLI tool to generate project structure, taken from YAML
github.com

Re: Show HN: Scaffolder, CLI tool to generate project structure, taken from YAML

#2

Post by makepanic » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 8:20 AM UTC

Nice, reminds me of https://yeoman.io/ which was popular couple years ago

Re: Show HN: Scaffolder, CLI tool to generate project structure, taken from YAML

#3

Post by woile » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 8:43 AM UTC

Looks nice, any plans to add variables and prompts?

I'd recommend adding at the very beginning of the README a short yaml sample. That's the first thing I wanted to look at, but I had to get some understanding and then I found the scaffolder-config repo.

Re: Show HN: Scaffolder, CLI tool to generate project structure, taken from YAML

#4

Post by spicybright » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 8:44 AM UTC

Unless I'm missing something, it seems like you could just make your template by hand with files and folders and just copy that folder to get the same result?

If you added simple variable substitution to use in filenames and file contents that would kick it up quite a few notches. Especially if you could use the result of bash command instead of static text.

Re: Show HN: Scaffolder, CLI tool to generate project structure, taken from YAML

#5

Post by prateek_mir » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 8:57 AM UTC

This is nice ! I like that you have kept the polyglot world in mind.

You should consider adding: 1) configurability in terms of name ( a templating engine might help ) 2) generate functional build files

Re: Show HN: Scaffolder, CLI tool to generate project structure, taken from YAML

#6

Post by hahn-kev » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 9:00 AM UTC

Skaffold a k8s deployment CLI tool, written in Go, configured with YAML. vs Scaffolder, a CLI tool written in go configured with YAML. Where's the confusion?

Re: Show HN: Scaffolder, CLI tool to generate project structure, taken from YAML

#7

Post by kgeist » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 9:04 AM UTC

spicybright wrote: post #4

Unless I'm missing something, it seems like you could just make your template by hand with files and folders and just copy that folder to get the same result? If you added simple variable substitution to use in filenames and file contents that would kick it up quite a few notches. Especially if you could use the result of bash command instead of static text.

We have a tool to quickly create microservices from a template; from what I remember, it's just a precreated folder with a Go project template which is copied over to the destination with a few fixups like "change the dummy package name to the target name". The hard part is not the copying part, it's to figure out what code should go in the template so that it was useful for most microservices.

P.S. Judging by [0], it wants you to paste template code inside YAML files. If you just precreate an actual project folder on disk and use it as a template (with, say, regexps for fixups), it's going to be easier to work with, as I can edit the template files in the IDE of my choice. Our microservice template is relatively large and changes quite often, it would be a nightmare to edit it and debug it via YAML files.

https://github.com/cemister/scaffold-configs/blob/master/cpp...