jennifer

Overview

Jennifer is a project scaffold generator. It uses common tools like sh and awk to quickly generate boilerplate code, configuration files or a directory structure.

Install

To install:

git clone git://github.com/nuex/jennifer.git
cd jennifer
make
sudo make install

Edit config.mk before running make if you want to customize the binary install directory (defaults to /usr/local/bin) and the awk library install directory (defaults to /usr/local/lib/jennifer).

Add the binary install directory to your path (unless it is already in your path):

echo "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin" >> ~/.bash_profile    # (bash example)

Usage

A jennifer template is simply a directory of files and directories that make up your project scaffold. A template could look like this:

some_directory/
  Jenfile
  my.code
  another.code

Templates are installed using the jen add command:

jen add some_directory

You can list installed templates:

jen list

Or delete them:

jen delete mytemplate

You generate a project from a stored template with jen new:

jen new mytemplate

You can also pass custom data to be bound to the template:

jen new mytemplate -v author="Trevor Goodchild" -v city="Bregna"

If you need to see what variables are available to bind data to, use the vars command:

jen vars mytemplate

The Jenfile is a text file with a list of instructions:

;
; Jennifer template for an Erlang OTP Application
;

name erlang-app
description A template for generating an Erlang OTP Application

var appid myapp
var description
template erlang-app/rebar.config rebar.config
dir apps/{{appid}}/src
template erlang-app/app.app.src apps/{{appid}}/src/{{appid}}.app.src
template erlang-app/app_app.erl apps/{{appid}}/src/{{appid}}.erl
template erlang-app/app_sup.erl apps/{{appid}}/src/{{appid}}_sup.erl

Jennifer templates use mustache notation for tags. Tags get replaced with data either from the second argument in the template's var command or by values you assign when you run the jen new command.

Template Commands

• name - name is the name of the template and is required.
• description - description is also required.
• var - var is used to either set default variable data or reference any variables used in the template.
• dir - dir creates a directory
• template - template has two arguments. The first argument is the source template, the second is the destination location.
• cp - cp also has two arguments. The first argument is the source file, the second is the destination location.