Devinit is a command-line utility written in Rust that provides the ability to write templates for files and projects and interactively apply them to make boilerplate less annoying.

See the examples directory for examples of writing file and project templates.

Command-line usage examples

# Configure a file at path 'licence.txt' with the 'LicenceBlock' template,
# specifying values for the variables 'name' and 'year'.
$ devinit file -p licence.txt "LicenceBlock" -Dname="John Doe" -Dyear="2024"

# Process the template 'EditorConfig' and output the result to stdout.
$ devinit file --dry-run "EditorConfig"

# Create and populate a folder called 'dotnet-project' from the project
# template 'DotNet', specifying the variable 'projectName'.
$ devinit project -p dotnet-project/ "DotNet" -DprojectName="Utils"

User configuration

Devinit is configured using the devinitrc.yml file, which can be stored at either ~/.devinit/ or ~/.config/devinit/. Otherwise, it can be explicitly specified using the --config command-line option.

devinitrc.yml enforces a standard YAML syntax. The following fields are required:

Field	Value
file_templates_loc	File template directory, relative to the configuration file
project_templates_loc	Project template directory, relative to the configuration file

Configuring project templates

Any folder in the project_templates_loc directory containing a templaterc.yml file will be registered as a project template. This configuration file is YAML, the same as the devinitrc file, and describes which files to process and where to output them.

Field	Value
files	Dictionary of output paths (relative to evaluated template output) mapped to inputs, e.g. out.txt: input.txt

Templating

A templating engine is provided to allow your configurations to use a simple format similar to Jinja, courtesy of the Tera project - see their documentation for an overview of the syntax.

Functions and filters

In addition to a multitude of built-in functions/filters provided by Tera (see docs here), some extras are also provided by Devinit, and are documented below.

---

FUNCTION licence(id: String)

Expand a software licence, where id is a valid SPDX id.

This function returns an object containing each component of the licence. The returned object is split up into the following elements (accessible by dot or square bracket notation):

• name - the licence name
• header - the standard licence header*
• text - the complete licence body

A lot of licences have places to substitute values, like year and copyright holder - it's recommended to use the provided replace filter to handle these template-side.

*Not all licences support the header component (the MIT licence, for example), and attempting to access it on them will result in an error. In these cases, use the guaranteed text field instead.

{% set gpl = licence(id = "GPL-2.0-only") -%}

{{ gpl.name }}
{{ gpl.header }}
{{ gpl.text }} {# A very long string #}

---

FILTER wrap(len: i32)

Break up the given string into lines of maximum length len, without breaking individual words.

{{ gpl.text | wrap(len = 80) }}

---

Planned features

• VS Code integration (extension)
• List of installed templates (e.g. devinit --list-templates - or should it be per sub-command (file, project)?)
• Comment blocks - function to take a multi-line string and append a prefix (e.g. // before each line)
  • Standard options for comment blocks, e.g. 'hashtag', 'slash', 'c89', etc.