Bowl.rs

This is a WIP. Some things here are just my musings about what the project should be rather than what it is at this current time. I believe this is a cool idea, and I'd like to explore it. For current functionality, the Creating a Template section will tell you how to use Bowl.

Bowl is a CLI tool for quickly bootstrapping applications from predefined boilerplate templates. While this tool is written in Rust and is meant to simplify my life putting some Rust applications together, it's language/framework-agnostic.

It's important to know what Bowl is not. Bowl is not a package manager or environment manager. It cannot install software for you. It cannot manage your environment variables or configurations. For this, you should look elsewhere. I recommend the tools below:

• direnv
• nvm
• brew

You can initialize boilerplate projects (script will prompt you for necessary data).

bowl new axum-askama

Planned: You can also define commands for your template.

bowl run bugwright/axum-askama add tailwind
bowl run bugwright/axum-askama add goose

Installation

Build From Source

Clone the project then cd into it.

git clone https://github.com/jackjohn7/bowl
cd bowl

Build and install.

cargo install --path .

Soup.rs (planned other repo)

Soup acts as a public repository of bowl templates, although you can make some templates private. If you need templates to be private, you can also host your own repository!

Web Interface

• Homepage has some links to various pieces of documentation and the templates page.
• Templates page shows a paginated listing of packages sorted by most recently published.
• Bar at the top of screen with
• Automatically generated documentation for subcommands and configuration options (bowl doc --open to preview).

API

• Have routes to get info about a template
• Have routes to return paginated template lists sorted by most recently published

User Ideas

• Require secret token to publish changes.
• Allow user to login through GitHub, GitLab, etc.

Creating a Template

To get started creating a bowl template, you can use the following:

bowl new my_template

This will create a bowl.toml file that specifies configurations and metadata for your template. Make sure to configure the metadata so your template can be found easily! This is also where the version number of the template can be found (default 1.0.0).

At the moment, only locally saving bowl templates is supported. To do this, run the following:

bowl publish --local

To then use your locally saved template, you can run the following:

bowl use my_template --local