pi

A CLI project initializer written in C.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Dependencies
• Usage
• Contributing
• License
• Additional Information

Installation

You will need a C compiler of some kind (or a pre-built binary from the releases page) to build this project. The current make system supports Clang, GCC, and Zig, but you can easily use your own compiler (in place of cc) with the command cc -I include src/**/* src/pi.c -o pi in the base directory.

To make it easier, a simplified configure/make system is provided. Simply run the following commands to build the project from scratch:

# Clone the repository to `./pi` and change current directory.
git clone https://github.com/uptudev/pi.git
cd ./pi

# Run the configure script and make the project.
./configure
make

This will build your executable with the filename pi on Unix-like systems, and pi.exe on Windows. Simply move this file to wherever your OS pulls binaries from, and you can build projects with the pi command.

If you want to install the binary to your system on Linux/Unix, you can run the following command, which will install the binary to /usr/local/bin by default. If you want to install it to a different location, you can change the INSTALL_DIR variable in the Makefile before running the following command:

sudo make install

For local installation, (INSTALL_DIR:=~/.local/bin), sudo is unnecessary.

Dependencies

This tool uses various build tools and package managers to initialize projects. The following dependencies are required for the following languages to work:

• Bun: Bun
• C/C++: No runtime dependencies.
• Go: Go
• Haskell: Cabal
• Lua: No runtime dependencies.
• Node.js: Node.js
• OCaml: Dune
• Ruby: Ruby
• Rust: Cargo
• V: V
• Zig: Zig

Once all languages have been implemented, the dependencies will be slowly removed from this list if I implement their behaviour natively. Most of the dependencies enable complex initialization processes that are not easily replicated in C via argument passing, so they are used to streamline the process and are unlikely to be removed.

Usage

The base initializer is run simply via pi, but if the project name and language are given, this can streamline the initialization process.

pi
pi <project_name>
pi <project_name> <language>
pi <project_name> <language> -- [passthrough_args]
pi -l <language> -n <project_name> -- [passthrough_args]

Any arguments ommitted will be prompted for by the program. The -- is used to separate the passthrough arguments from the program arguments; passthrough arguments are passed directly to the subsequently-routed initialization script.

For instance, if you want to initialize a barebones Node.js project in ./my_project, you can run the following command:

pi my_project node -- -y

To create a new Svelte project using Bun, you can run the following command:

pi -l bun -- svelte@latest

which will query the user for a project name before creating the project via the svelte initializer.

Contributing

This shouldn't really need too much in terms of collaboration, but feel free to send in a pull request if you have a feature you feel that I should add! I'm always open to adding languages and frameworks to the project initializer, as it has little overhead and is a good way to learn about new technologies.

License

This code is licensed under the MIT License.