Project Kit CLI

Dev-focused Ruby CLI tool to improve propagation efficiency

Table of Contents

1. About The Project
   • Built With
2. Installation
3. Usage
4. Project Kit
5. Additional Takeaways

About The Project

• Project Kit is a ruby project starter kit that makes bootstrapping and syncing common development items easy.
  • It aims to speed up ruby projects by hosting these development templates in a centralised directory as a single source of truth and propagate changes to multiple projects all from a single point.
  • Project Kit is built using Thor, a toolkit for building CLI interfaces. A Thor class exposes an executable with a number of subcommands where public methods defined become task commands.

Built With

• Ruby
• Thor

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Installation

~ gem install thor

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Usage

Using a .thor file

1. Run thor list or thor -T to see a list of available commands for a thor task

2. Run thor help <command> to see the description and options for a particular command

Using a .rb file

Within some projects you may find the following directory:

├── bin
    └── command
└── lib
    ├── command.rb
    └── subcommand.rb

1. To call lib, we need to change the permissions of our bin script so that it can be executed

~ chmod a+x <file> 
or 
~ chmod a+x bin/command

2. Now, we are able to call it by running ./<file> or bin/command

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Project Kit

Usage

1. Install missing gem executables

~ bundle install

2. Change the permissions so that the script can be executed

~ chmod +x exe/project_kit

3. Call lib by executing exe/project_kit in the current context of bundle

~ bundle exec exe/project_kit
Commands:
project_kit help [COMMAND]  # Describe available commands or one specific command
project_kit setup           # initial ruby project setup
project_kit sync            # compares project templates with an existing target app directory  


~ bundle exec exe/project_kit setup gem 
name of your new project: hello
setting up hello...
    create  ../hello/.gitignore
    create  ../hello/.ruby-version
    create  ../hello/Gemfile
    create  ../hello/LICENSE.txt
hello gem project successfully setup


~ bundle exec exe/project_kit sync gem -t ../hello
finding ../hello
 identical  ../hello/.gitignore
 identical  ../hello/.ruby-version
 identical  ../hello/Gemfile
 identical  ../hello/LICENSE.txt
+--------------+----------------+
| Synced Files | Unsynced Files |
+--------------+----------------+
|.gitignore    |                |
|.ruby-version |                |
|Gemfile       |                |
|LICENSE.txt   |                |
+--------------+----------------+

4. Package and install the gem

~ gem build project_kit.gemspec
~ gem install project_kit-1.0.0.gem --local

5. Run the gem

~ project_kit

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Testing

Run rspec spec/project_kit_spec.rb to test the behavior of the CLI

ProjectKit
#setup
name of your new project: test
setting up test...
    create  project-kit-cli/test/.gitignore
    create  project-kit-cli/test/.ruby-version
    create  project-kit-cli/test/Gemfile
    create  project-kit-cli/test/LICENSE.txt
test gem project successfully setup
  initial setup of a gem project
#sync
finding ../test
 identical  project-kit-cli/test/.gitignore
 identical  project-kit-cli/test/.ruby-version
 identical  project-kit-cli/test/Gemfile
 identical  project-kit-cli/test/LICENSE.txt
+--------------+----------------+
| Synced Files | Unsynced Files |
+--------------+----------------+
|.gitignore    |                |
|.ruby-version |                |
|Gemfile       |                |
|LICENSE.txt   |                |
+--------------+----------------+
  sync gem templates to ../test directory

Finished in 1.18 seconds (files took 0.36764 seconds to load)
2 examples, 0 failures

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Additional Takeaways

• Unlike Thor files, .start(ARGV) would need to be added at the end of a Ruby script to instantiate the class and invoke the task
• Ruby relies on absolute paths while Thor relies on relative paths, hence the need to resolve the path difference when accessing templates
• In Project Kit, a File.file? check was performed to ensure that the current iterable is a file and not a directory, as by default template() creates a copy of a file which might lead to subsequent file clashes
  • eg. a file clash between .github and .github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md
• Open3#popen3 allows you to interact with the external command while it is running and consolidates all 3 of the std pipes into a single stream
• As each pipe has a limited buffer size, it is important to ensure the stdout streams are continuously read else stdin.write will be blocked

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