Go Generate from Template (ggft)

ggft is a tool for managing templates and generating new projects based on them. Commands are available to download, list, and delete templates. This leads to less typing of boilerplate or IDE magic when starting a new project, and helping to enable consistency on teams, or if you need to manage and use git repos on many computers.

Installation

To install ggft, the quickest way is to use the standard go get process:

go get github.com/mjslabs/ggft

Alternatively, if you'd like to use custom build directives, add features, or install a versioned binary, use the clone and make method:

git clone https://github.com/mjslabs/ggft.git && cd ggft
make install

Usage

A common pattern to use with ggft is to download a template once, and then deploy it many times. For example:

ggft get https://github.com/mjslabs/ggft-microservice ms
ggft new ms my-new-project
ggft new ms my-other-new-project

This would download the ggft-microservice repo to a local cache directory (defaults to ~/.ggft/templates), and then creates two new directories using the ggft-microservice directory as a starting point. Assuming the ggft-microservice repo uses Go template syntax in its files, the user will be prompted for values for those template variables.

Advanced

ggft new has a few flags that allow you to customize how files are processed. There are options to treat files as regular (non-template) files, trimming file suffixes, and more. See ggft new -h for more info.

Creating a template repo

ggft template repos are simply git repos that have files containing Go template syntax and special file suffixes. Here's an example with inline comments:

example
├── Makefile       <-- Makefile specific to this project
├── README.md      <-- README for the template itself. Will be ignored on parse
├── README.md.ggft <-- Will be turned into README.md when parsed by ggft
└── myproject.c    <-- A file using Go template syntax to be parsed by ggft

You can see other than README, we simply have a repo of files that we want to use to seed our new project directory when we run ggft. For more info on how the README parsing works, see the help documentation on the -t and -i flags of ggft new.

Caveats

ggft will try to initialize a config structure in ~/.ggft and use this for all template storage. This is not yet configurable.