cccmk

cccmk is a tool to facilitate harmonizing files and folders across all of your projects, so as to ensure that they follow the "project template" that suits you.

cccmk is language-agnostic: it only deals with text files and folders, so anything goes! You can create any "project template" which suits your needs - see the "Documentation" section below to learn more. cccmk comes with a fully-featured "project template" for several popular programming languages, which follow conventional folder structure.

cccmk is implemented entirely in .sh shell scripts, so it is fully modifiable by the end-user (it follows the MIT license, so you are free to do whatever you wish with it).

NOTE: cccmk is not SCM-agnostic! Currently, it assumes that your SCM tool is git - but this will be made more generic, in the future.

Rationale

You may think that cccmk is redundant, because on the surface it seems that this is similar to a typical SCM tool (such as git, svn, etc), but the primary goal of cccmk is to be used alongside your SCM tool of choice, to harmonize files across your different repositories. With this goal in mind, cccmk is much simpler in how it tracks files than, say for instance, git: whereas with git everything is tracked by default, and you purposefully create a ./.gitignore file to exclude certain files from the repo ; with cccmk, the ./.cccmk file only lists those files which are part of your "project template", so they can be tracked, compared, and updated.

The name cccmk is derived from the ++C language, which is often called CCC, after its common file extension *.ccc, and its standard library, libccc. It is worth noting that cccmk was originally designed as a build system management tool for projects which use make, and the aim was to use cccmk to help maintain a complex multi-makefile build system, which offers many make commands akin to package manager tools of several modern programming languages (like cargo for Rust, or npm/npx for JavaScript/TypeScript). This makefile-based build system is provided in the default "project template", in the cccmk/project/_if_ask_mkfile/ folder.

Usage

cccmk has three main features/commands:

cccmk create: creating new projects, using the "project template"
cccmk diff: comparing tracked project files to the corresponding "project template" source file
cccmk update: updating files in existing projects, to synchronize them with their "project template" source

To learn more, try using cccmk --help.

Documentation

Each project template file is processed by the template.awk templater program (located at cccmk/scripts/template.awk), here is an explanation of how this templater program works:

// This script creates a text file from a project template text file
// Here is an example of how this script should be called:
	$ awk \
		-v variables=" foo=FOO; bar=BAR; " \
		-f ~/.cccmk/scripts/utils.awk \
		-f ~/.cccmk/scripts/template-functions.awk \
		-f ~/.cccmk/scripts/template.awk \
		"$inputfile"

// As for the syntax of the template file's contents, essentially 3 kinds of directives are accepted:

// 1. variable (string expansion): is replaced with the content of the variable named 'varname'
	%[varname]%

// 2. loop (array expansion): is replaced with 'n' lines, for each element of the 'array' variable
	%%for (varname): // (single-line version) some code here
	%%for (varname)
	// (multi-line version - note the absence of ':') some code here
	%%end for

// 3. conditional: is put into the output only if the condition evaluates to true
	%%if myfunc(foo,bar): // (single-line version) some code here
	%%if myfunc(foo,bar)
	// (multi-line version - note the absence of ':') some code here
	%%end if

The functions which can be used in conditional directives are implemented in cccmk/scripts/template-functions.awk. By default, a couple of useful functions are provided:

%%if true(): Always include the given section
%%if false(): Never include the given section
%%if is(varname,text): Checks if the variable varname contains a value which is identical to the given text.
%%if matches(varname, regexp): Checks if the variable varname matches the given regexp regular expression.
%%if tracked(filepath): Checks if the given project template filepath is tracked in the project's .cccmk file.

Installation

While it is simple enough to download this repo as a .zip and manually install cccmk, it is recommended that you clone the repo properly, using git clone (see "Step 1, method A: read-only installation"). If you wish to customize the "project template", or cccmk itself, then it is probably best that you fork this repository, so that you can then git push your custom changes to your own forked repo (see "Step 1, method B: customizable installation").

Step 1, method A: read-only installation

So, start by cloning the cccmk repo directly:

git clone  https://github.com/LexouDuck/cccmk.git  ~/.cccmk

Step 1, method B: customizable installation

So, start by forking the repo (learn more here: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/fork-a-repo). When you clone your forked repo, you may want to use an SSH address rather than HTTPS, depending on your use-case:

git clone  git@github.com:<USERNAME>/cccmk.git  ~/.cccmk

Step 2: installing the cccmk command

The above step will create your cccmk installation, in the standard ~/.cccmk/ directory.

Then, we simply need to let your shell know where to find the cccmk command:

sudo ln -s  ~/.cccmk/scripts/cccmk.sh  /usr/local/bin/cccmk
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/cccmk # On most systems, this isn't necessary

That should be it ! Try running cccmk --help to see if it works.

NOTE: If you use a windows machine, then, depending on the shell that you use, there is perhaps no chmod command, there is probably no sudo command, and there is most likely no simple working ln -s command to create symlinks. In this case, the best manner to have a working cccmk command is to add your installation folder to your PATH env variable, like so:

export PATH="$PATH:~/.cccmk/scripts/"
mv ~/.cccmk/scripts/cccmk.sh ~/.cccmk/scripts/cccmk # remove the .sh file extension from the main entry-point script

Repo folder structure

./project: holds the template source files used when creating a new project with cccmk new.
./scripts: holds the source code sheel scripts which make up the cccmk toolchain.