Platonic

General-purpose archetype directory reification

Platonic is a TypeScript library focused on general-purpose template reification applied to a directory tree.

More precisely, it recursively copies all the files from a source directory to a target directory - creating the latter if it doesn't already exist and never deleting (at most replacing) its files. Furthermore, it applies selective metadata injection via EJS-based templating.

The source directory can contain one or both of the following subdirectories:

• static: directory tree that will be copied unaltered to the target directory

• templates: directory tree that will be processed using the EJS template engine, injecting an arbitrary metadata object into each file

Such minimalism makes Platonic especially useful in the context of tools like npm/Yarn project generators and bulk file management apps, whenever expressive templating is required.

Installation

npm install @giancosta86/platonic

or

yarn add @giancosta86/platonic

The public API entirely resides in the root package index, so one shouldn't reference specific modules.

Usage

Platonic provides the Archetype class, which includes:

• the constructor, whose input is an ArchetypeSettings object: in practice, its sourceDirectory field contains the path to the source directory - which, in turn, must contain one or more of the static and templates subdirectories, as described above

• the reify() method takes a ReificationSettings<TMetadata> object, with the following fields:

  • targetDirectory: the directory that will receive both the static files and the reified templates. Additionally:

    • if it doesn't already exist, it will be created

    • if it already contains files, they won't be deleted - but they could be overwritten

  • metadata: arbitrary object - compatible with the Data interface required by EJS - used to inject metadata into every file below the templates subdirectory of the source directory. It is optional - especially when just using the static directory tree and no templates

  • encoding: the source encoding for template files - and the related output files, too. Optional: utf8 is the default value

  The method returns a Promise<void> that represents the reification process itself.

In practice, you just need to create an Archetype instance and then call its reify() method as soon as you need it and as many times as you need it - always waiting for the resolution of the returned Promise.

//You can initialize the Archetype anywhere...
const archetype = new Archetype({
  sourceDirectory: "..."
});

//...and you can call reify() whenever you need it!
await archetype.reify({
  targetDirectory: "...",
  metadata: {
    name: "Yogi",
    age: 36
  },
  encoding: "utf8"
});

Further references

• create-marp-slides - dedicated to the creation of Marp-based projects with detached Sass stylesheets and dedicated lifecycle scripts, including a very effective watch feature