Strapping Young Lad - Project Template Token Replacer and Bootstrapper

Today I have released the super simple, rough-as-hell, barely MVP Strapping Young Lad(Source). It's fulfils a need I keep having but never really fixing.

Evelvator Pitch

SYL, or lad for short, will take a git repo, clone it and replace a bunch of tokens in it with the values you've supplied.

Say Wha?

This means you can create a bunch of base solution/project types for any language and SYL will simply do some basic file/folder renaming and file content replacing for a given token. For example doing the following,

lad /path/to/git/repo MyNewProject

Will do the following things,

1. Clone the repo at path/to/git/repo into a temporary folder
2. Remove the .git folder from the repo
3. Check for the existence of a .ladconfig in the freshly cloned repo

• If one exists it loads the config setting
• Otherwise it falls back to the defaults

1. Replace all instances of the configured token (eg. __NAME__) in all files, directories and file contents with the project name (in our case MyNewProject)
2. Copy the new folder over to your current working directory (./MyNewProject)

What this allows you to do is have a standard project template for pretty much anything (.NET, Ruby, Scala - listen I mean anything - if it a collection of folders and files in a git repo then you set) and create a new instance with a few keystrokes - saving you time and potential RSI.

SYL was inspired by WarmuP which is itself a gem but it requires you to be running .NET which for a lot of my requirement isn't going to cut it.

If you want to see what a typical template project looks like try Amir's Loam repo. This is a WarmuP project but works just fine. With SYL you can create a .ladconfig file to override some of the conventions - get the source README linked above.

Whats Next

Yep it's pretty damn basic right now but it satifies most of my needs right now. There are a few things I want to add for myself but I didn't release this for ME, I am pretty sure this will be of use to someone in some community in some shape or form. With that in mind here are some features I think would take this to the next level,

1. Specifiying multiple tokens e.g. __NAME__ and __NAMESPACE__ and __YEAR__ etc. etc.
2. Post processing actions (e.g. bundle install or npm install or sbt compile or something like that)
3. A catalog - I have a github organisation with no repos setup right now but this would be a brilliant place to hold a load of templates compatible with SYL, don't ya think? Then I could roll a site like rubygems or npmjs.org and make the projects searchable etc. If you build it, they will come. Maybe, who knows.

So if you like it - HIGHFIVE - if not - it's all good. Now go break it and criticise me.

So we'll criticise him, because he can take it.... [The Dark Knight, Approx.]