Templater

Templater is a CLI tool that makes it easier to make, use and share code and project templates.

Usage: templater <template folder> <output path> [flags]

Flags:
  -h, --help            help for templater
  -m, --mode string     Output writing mode - one of append, ignore, replace, merge (default "replace")
  -v, --values string   File containing parameter values

Rundown

A templates constitutes a folder that contains a templates folder and a params.yaml file.

Templates

Templates are defined using the Go template format extended with sprig functions library The template for the example shown above and found in examples looks as follows

{{if (eq .timestamp "Yes")}}# Generated at {{now}}
{{end}}print("{{.greeting}} world from {{.name}}!")

The relative path of each folder is also a template in itself. So for examples /{{.filename}} would render a file named with the filename variable, but if we named it and /{{uuidv4}} the filename will be a different uuid on each execution. You can also use the templating on the folders that preceed the final, which can be useful for instance for generating packages.

Parameters

To make it easier to use the template, you should create a params.yaml file which describes your input variables. The params.yaml for the example above looks like this:

- param: file
  title: Generated file name
  type: textfield
  example: ex. script

- param: greeting
  title: Preffered greeting?
  type: choice
  options:
    - Hello
    - Greetings
    - What's up

- param: name
  title: Your name
  type: textfield
  example: Alex

- param: timestamp
  title: Add timestamp
  type: choice
  options:
    - "Yes"
    - "No"

This file is then consumed by the CLI to generate a simple terminal user interface that acts a setup wizard.

(TODO add docs for param types)

You can optionally omit this file and populate your parameters using a YAML file passed with the -v flag.

Writing modes

By default, if there is already a file on the path of a new generated file, the new one will replace the old one. However, you can change this beahviour using the --mode flag to one of append, ignore, replace, merge

mode	description	existing file content	new file content	result
append	Appends the generated content to the end of the existing file	a b c	a X c	a b c a X c
ignore	Ignores the new content and let's the old one stay	a b c	a X c	a b c
replace	Replaces the old content with the new one	a b c	a X c	a X c
merge	Merges the two using a 3 way merge with the template as origin	a b c	a X c	a b X c