Scavader

Some true magic about scaffolding a web [backend/front]-end application !

• Create your own wizard to scaffold your project.
• Use one of the built-in scaffold to generate your project (WIP)

What is it for ? Let's say that every time you start a new project on the same stack, you are doing the same things over and over again. Here is a usecase example:

• Create a repository and cloning it
• Generating the NPM package.json file with $ npm init
• Removing some directories
• Editing the titles
• Removing some useless file
• Removing some useless portion of codes
• Installing other dependencies
• Moving file around
• Creating a new README.md and DOCS.md
• ...

Why don't you write down those steps in a JSON file once and use it in Scavader each time you want to initialize a new projet ? You can configure this tool to ask you some custom questions and execute some custom commands.

Features

• Nice command line interface
• Easy wizard creation using JSON
• Built-in scaffolds

Installation

npm install -g @scavader/scavader

or

npm install --save scavader (and adapt the commands futher with ./node_modules/.bin/scavader ...)

Getting started

Create a new scaffold

Initialize the scaffolding structure: scavader init. This will generate a scaffold wizard example where you can start working in.

• Edit the ./scaffold/questions to customize your scaffold wizard.
• Edit the ./scaffold/commands to customize what your scaffold should do.

Run your scaffold

• Run your new scaffold wizard using: scavader run

Command Line Interface (CLI)

Run scavader without any arguments to see the help menu. By default, scavader will initialize and run using the ./scaffold folder name.

• Scaffold from built-in project:

  $ scavader init [-p projectName] [-d directoryName]
  $ scavader run [-d directoryName]

• Scaffold a specific built-in project (here the web-application project) and output to a specific directory:

  $ scavader init -p web-application -d myscavader 
  $ scavader run -d myscavader

• Create a basic scaffold and run the wizard

  $ scavader init -d myscavader 
  $ scavader run -d myscavader

• Run scaffold wizard using another set of questions (you can create other question(s) file(s) in the ./scaffold/questions directory and use the -q option to specify which one to use):

  $ scavader run -d myscavader -q secondary_questions

Example of usage in a script

Scavader = require("scavader")

// Question(s) file to use
const questionsFile = "questions";

// Example of scavader using the `./scaffold.example` folder and run the
// questions located in `./scaffold.example/questions/questions.js`
let scavader = new M.Scavader("./scaffold/", "Scavader");
scavader.run(questionsFile).then(result => {
  console.log(result);
});

Built-in projects (WIP)

• basic: a basic example to demonstrate how scaffold are made.
• simple-http: A simple and basic HTTP server with a single index.html file.
• web-application: this will run a wizard asking you things about the server and client framework you want to use.
  • As of today: only lit-element (client side) and NodeJS + firebase (server side) are supported
• More soon. This is not my priority right now. Therefore, some help would be appreciated

Create your own scaffold

Take a look at the ./projects/web-application/questions and ./projects/web-application/commands example that stands in this repository.

The question file is nothing more than a list of questions that have a specific format. Check the built in projects to have more insights. You should be aware that the type and choices fields are the same as in the Inquirer package. You can have all of them: input, number, confirm, list, rawlist, expand, checkbox, password, editor (as of 2020-03-06).

Demonstration and documentation

Go to the Scavader package directory (cd node_modules/scavader) or download a clone of the project from github.com and run npm install.

• Run the demonstration: npm run demo
• Launch the offline documentation: npm run doc

History

Scavader means Scaffolder-Invader, this tools was build to quickly scaffold my own projects.

Author and Contributor

Yves Lange