Welcome to Spawn

Spawn is a basic tool that helps you start your projects easily using simple templates.

Majority of project templates just need files copied from a template folder and replace placeholders inside files throughout that folder with certain project specific value (e.g: project name, project version, etc).

Enter Spawn: put a template folder on GitHub (for now), add a config file to that folder enumerating the variables to replace throughout the folder and you're set.

Every time you'll need a new project based on that template, just call spawn <GitHubUser>/<GitHubRepo>. Spawn will prompts you to enter values for template variables defined in the config and you're good to go.

Installation

In order to use Spawn you'll need Node and npm, which usually comes bundled with Node.

After installing Node and npm, just run the following command:

npm install spawn-cli -g

On Unix machines, depending on your system configuration, you might need to run the above command using sudo.

Usage

I've setup a repo to help you see Spawn in action and how easy is to set-up a template repo: hello-spawn

You can see that there is a config file named spawn.json that contains one key values and it's value is an object of which the keys are the variable names and the values are the default for the variable names.

Now let's spawn an instance of hello-spawn on your machine.

Go inside an empty folder on your disk and type the following command:

spawn surdu/hello-spawn

You'll notice that spawn will start asking you your name and the version, as specified in the config.

After you provide all this info, you'll have a fresh copy of the hello-spawn project spawned in your current folder.

This is pretty much alt there is to it, for now at least.