cl-cookieproject

A cookiecutter template for Common Lisp projects featuring:

• Canonical Common Lisp project structure, a ready-to-use project with an entry point and unit tests.
• Run project from sources
• Build a binary
• and choose your Lisp implementation
• Test suite using Fiveam
  • a travis CI configuration file (untested)
• Roswell recipe to build, install and share a binary
• example use of command line arguments (uiop:command-line-arguments). Proper parsing is left to do with a third-party library (clingon, unix-opts, defmain, adopt…).

We are also shaping out a template for a web project, see cl-cookieweb.

NEW! 🎥 See our demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFc513MJjos

Usage

Create a new project. You'll be prompted to provide some basic information about your new project, which will then be auto-generated in the current working directory:

$ pip install cookiecutter
$ cookiecutter https://github.com/vindarel/cl-cookieproject
project_name [cookie-lisp-project]:
repo_name [cookie-lisp-project]:
description []: A test project
version [0.0.1]:
year [1984]:
author [CL User]: me
email [me@mail.com]:
username [me]:
Initialised empty Git repository in /home/vince/bacasable/lisp-projects/cookie-lisp-project/.git/

Run it straight away:

$ cd cookie-lisp-project
$ sudo apt install rlwrap  # a utility to bring readline keybindings and history to SBCL on the terminal.
$ make run
rlwrap sbcl --load run.lisp
This is SBCL 2.0.10, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/>.

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses.  See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
To load "cffi":
  Load 1 ASDF system:
    cffi
; Loading "cffi"
.
To load "cookie-lisp-project":
  Load 1 ASDF system:
    cookie-lisp-project
; Loading "cookie-lisp-project"
[package cookie-lisp-project]
Hello from cookie-lisp-project!
*

You can see the Hello from the main function, and we are given a Lisp REPL.

Build an executable:

$ make build
[…]
[saving current Lisp image into /home/vince/bacasable/lisp-projects/cookie-lisp-project/cookie-lisp-project:
writing 0 bytes from the read-only space at 0x50000000
writing 736 bytes from the static space at 0x50100000
writing 37060608 bytes from the dynamic space at 0x1000000000
writing 2154496 bytes from the immobile space at 0x50200000
writing 13910016 bytes from the immobile space at 0x52000000
done]

$ ./cookie-lisp-project me
Hello me from cookie-lisp-project!

$ ./cookie-lisp-project -h
Usage:

  cookie-lisp-project [name]

Build it with Roswell:

$ ros build roswell/cookie-lisp-project.ros

A binary is created in the roswell directory.

Your users can install the application with:

$ ros install github_username/project_name

Cookiecutter options

You can use command line options: https://cookiecutter.readthedocs.io/en/1.7.2/advanced/cli_options.html

• --no-input: do not prompt for parameters and only use cookiecutter.json file content
• --replay: do not prompt for parameters and only use information entered previously
• -f, --overwrite-if-exists: overwrite the contents of the output directory if it already exists
• -s, --skip-if-file-exists: skip the files in the corresponding directories if they already exist
• -o, --output-dir: where to output the generated project dir into
• --config-file: user configuration file

The first time you run cookiecutter with a link to a GitHub repository, the skeleton is saved under ~/.cookiecutters/. You can run the command for the second time with only the skeleton name:

cookiecutter cl-cookieproject

TODOs

• initialize a git repository
• better guess the author
• include a documentation system
• web project skeleton
• more CI setup
• build a .deb (and .rpm)

See also

• https://github.com/dnaeon/cl-skeleton
  • the newest of skeletons (late 2022), by an author with great contributed libraries.
  • an ASDF system, a test system, scripts for running the tests, Dockerfiles for ECL, CCL and SBCL implementations and Github Actions for building Docker images and running the test suite of the project.
  • just a shell script to fill-in the template files.
  • from what I see, the generated project is very simple, the .asd is barebones (no default op to build a binary with asdf:make for example). The value lies in the files around: the 3 little Dockerfiles (they use clfoundation's images, like I do for Gitlab CI), the script to run tests (they use rove, the script returns the correct error code).
• https://github.com/fukamachi/cl-project
  • one-package per file style (called "modern" but I find it too cumbersome to use)
  • uses the Rove test system (and I think it is not ready, see this discussion and its own issues)
  • less integration (no recipe to build binaries, use CLI args or use Roswell). Pure CL, doesn't need Cookiecutter (Python).
• https://github.com/triclops200/quickapp and quickapp-cli
  • last commit 2016 / 2015
    • its internal-quit in app-utils.lisp should be uiop:quit
  • uses buildapp: kind of old and not needed now with asdf:make or Roswell? (proove me wrong)
  • includes an args parsing utility (it should probably use a more complete library though)
• https://www.xach.com/lisp/quickproject/
  • doesn't include a test definition
  • simple, nothing fancy.
• https://github.com/40ants/cl-project-with-docs
  • uses Sphinx and reStructured text to render nice and readable HTML documentation.
  • automatic gh-pages
  • includes tests, CI (Travis), Roswell
  • needs Sphinx (Python) and cl-launch.
  • 2018: I suspect the author has now another favourite documentation generator (MGLPAX, 40ants/doc) and might not update much this skeleton.
• https://github.com/40ants/project-templates : templates to create a CL library or a web app with Reblocks.
  • uses Quicklisp, Ultralisp, Qlot, CLPM, has Rove tests, has a GitHub CI, has docs (based on 40ants-doc). Based on the mystic templating system.
  • Youtube demo
  • created in 2023
  • as of writing, doesn't have a utility to quickly run the web app project from the terminal, but from the editor, so all in all maybe a bit hard to use for total beginners. Otherwise, it's a configuration totally worth checking out.

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Acknowledgement: we forked cookiecutter-cl.