Hotplate

A simple boilerplate system

There are two main components:

• templates: arbitrary jinja templates
• recipes: yaml files that define...
  • project directory structure
  • what files to create from what templates
  • default variable values

Usage

hotplate <recipe name> <project path>

hotplate will parse all the required variables and prompt you to enter them. At present these variables are all treated as strings.

Recipes

Basics

Recipes define the project structure and which templates to use.

For example:

proj:
    index.html: threejs.html
    css:
        main.sass: main.sass

This will result in the following project structure:

.
├── index.html
└── css
    └── main.sass

Where index.html is created from the templates/threejs.html template and main.sass is created from the templates/main.sass template.

Recipe variables

Recipes can also define variables to pass to templates.

For instance, say I have a template for package.json and I want to create a recipe for three.js projects. For this recipe I want to include three as a dependency, but I want to it exclude it otherwise.

I could make templates/package.json like so:

{
  "name": "{{ project_name }}",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "dependencies": {
    {% if three %}
    "three": "latest",
    {% endif %}
    "underscore": "latest"
  }
}

Then, in my three.js recipe, which I'd create at recipes/three.yml, I'd include (just showing the relevant package.json bit here):

proj:
    package.json: package.json
vars:
    three: true

Recipe bases

It can be annoying to manually map every project file to a template if you want to basically copy over a template directory.

For example, say I have the following template directory, templates/three:

.
├── app
│   └── Scene.js
├── css
│   └── main.sass
├── index.html
└── main.js

I don't want to have to do something like this for my recipe:

proj:
    package.json: package.json
    index.html: three/index.html
    main.js: three/main.js
    app:
        Scene.js: three/app/Scene.js
    css:
        main.sass: three/css/main.sass

That's too redundant. Instead, you can specify a "base" template directory, which is automatically mirrored to the new project:

proj:
    package.json: package.json
base: three

Here, base: three tells hotplate to mirror templates/three as a starting point.