boilerplate

Tools and conventions for authoring and using declarative configurations for project "boilerplates" that can be consumed by any build system or project scaffolding tool.

Usage no npm install needed!

<script type="module">
  import boilerplate from 'https://cdn.skypack.dev/boilerplate';
</script>

README

boilerplate NPM version NPM downloads Build Status

Tools and conventions for authoring and using declarative configurations for project "boilerplates" that can be consumed by any build system or project scaffolding tool.

Table of Contents

(TOC generated by verb using markdown-toc)

Install

Install with npm:

$ npm install --save boilerplate

Welcome to boilerplate! Here you'll find both the tools and conventions for creating project boilerplates.

What does this do?

  1. Makes it easy to create and publish new projects from boilerplates that have reusable [scaffolds][scaffold], templates, styles, themes, data etc.
  2. To uncouple these "non-moving-parts" from any particular build system or generator, so we can easily generate new projects by simply passing the boilerplate config object to your build system or project generator of choice!

Example

In the following example, we define:

  • scaffolds for our marketing and developer sites
  • targets inside each scaffold (site and blog)
  • files configurations inside each "site" and "blog" target

The configuration is similar to how grunt tasks would be defined.

var boilerplate = require('boilerplate');

boilerplate({
  marketing: {
    site: {
      src: 'templates/mktg/*.hbs',
      dest: 'site/'
    },
    blog: {
      src: 'content/blog/*.md',
      dest: 'site/blog/'
    }
  },
  developer: {
    site: {
      src: 'templates/dev/*.hbs',
      dest: 'site/developer'
    },
    blog: {
      src: 'content/dev/blog/*.md',
      dest: 'site/developer/blog/'
    }
  }
});

The Boilerplate library "expands" this configuration into a normalized object that can easily be passed to gulp, grunt, assemble, metalsmith, or even yeoman, for scaffolding out various parts of a blog, website, web application or whatever you think a boilerplate might be useful for!

Table of contents

(TOC generated by verb using markdown-toc)

html5-boilerplate example

Just to show how easy it is to convert an existing project into a Boilerplate project using the most popular boilerplate of them all: html5-boilerplate.

(Get hands-on with the h5bp recipe)

Install h5bp

First, install boilerplate and html5-boilerplate:

$ npm i boilerplate && git clone https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate.git vendor/h5bp

Define the boilerplate

The following examples returns a normalized configuration object for every file in the html5-boilerplate project, organized exactly the way the project itself is organized.

var Boilerplate = require('boilerplate');
var h5bp = new Boilerplate({
  options: {
    cwd: 'vendor/h5bp/dist'
  },
  root: {src: ['{.*,*.*}'],   dest: 'src/'},
  css:  {src: ['css/*.css'],  dest: 'src/'},
  doc:  {src: ['doc/*.md'],   dest: 'src/'},
  js:   {src: ['js/**/*.js'], dest: 'src/'}
});
console.log(h5bp);

Results in the following object:

{
  options: {
    cwd: 'vendor/h5bp/dist'
  },
  config: {},
  targets: {
    root: {
      options: {
        cwd: 'vendor/h5bp/dist'
      },
      files: [
        {
          src: [
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/.DS_Store',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/.editorconfig',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/.gitattributes',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/.gitignore',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/.htaccess',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/404.html',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/apple-touch-icon.png',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/browserconfig.xml',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/crossdomain.xml',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/favicon.ico',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/humans.txt',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/index.html',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/LICENSE.txt',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/robots.txt',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/tile-wide.png',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/tile.png'
          ],
          dest: 'src/',
          options: {
            cwd: 'vendor/h5bp/dist'
          },
          name: 'scaffold'
        }
      ]
    },
    css: {
      options: {
        cwd: 'vendor/h5bp/dist'
      },
      files: [
        {
          src: [
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/css/main.css',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/css/normalize.css'
          ],
          dest: 'src/',
          options: {
            cwd: 'vendor/h5bp/dist'
          },
          name: 'scaffold'
        }
      ]
    },
    doc: {
      options: {
        cwd: 'vendor/h5bp/dist'
      },
      files: [
        {
          src: [
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/doc/css.md',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/doc/extend.md',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/doc/faq.md',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/doc/html.md',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/doc/js.md',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/doc/misc.md',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/doc/TOC.md',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/doc/usage.md'
          ],
          dest: 'src/',
          options: {
            cwd: 'vendor/h5bp/dist'
          },
          name: 'scaffold'
        }
      ]
    },
    js: {
      options: {
        cwd: 'vendor/h5bp/dist'
      },
      files: [
        {
          src: [
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/js/main.js',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/js/plugins.js',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/js/vendor/jquery-1.11.3.min.js',
            'vendor/h5bp/dist/js/vendor/modernizr-2.8.3.min.js'
          ],
          dest: 'src/',
          options: {
            cwd: 'vendor/h5bp/dist'
          },
          name: 'scaffold'
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

FAQ

What is a boilerplate?

A boilerplate is a project with generic, reusable code, files or content that is intended to be used as a starting point for creating new projects.

What does this project provide?

What does this NOT provide?

Workflows and tools for actually generating new projects from a boilerplate. This is a job much better suited for build systems like assemble, gulp, grunt, broccoli, and yeoman.

If you publish a library that works with Boilerplate, please let us know about it!

Comparison table

Many definitions exist for the terms "boilerplate", "scaffold" and "template". The following definitions describe these concepts as it relates to this project.

type description
template Resuable file, code or content which contains "placeholder" values that will eventually be replaced with real values by a rendering (template) engine
scaffold Consists of one or more templates or source files and serves as a "temporary support structure" that may be used to initialize a new project, or to provide ad-hoc "components" throughout the duration of a project.
boilerplate Boilerplates consist of all of the necessary files required to initialize a complete project.

History

v0.6.0

  • removed: targets are no longer added to boilerplate.targets. Instead they are added to boilerplate.scaffolds.default.targets. As a result there is no need to loop over both targets and scaffolds at build time

About

Related projects

  • assemble: Get the rocks out of your socks! Assemble makes you fast at creating web projects… more | homepage
  • boilerplate: Tools and conventions for authoring and publishing boilerplates that can be generated by any build… more | homepage
  • generate: Command line tool and developer framework for scaffolding out new GitHub projects. Generate offers the… more | homepage
  • scaffold: Conventions and API for creating declarative configuration objects for project scaffolds - similar in format… more | homepage
  • templates: System for creating and managing template collections, and rendering templates with any node.js template engine… more | homepage
  • update: Be scalable! Update is a new, open source developer framework and CLI for automating updates… more | homepage
  • verb: Documentation generator for GitHub projects. Verb is extremely powerful, easy to use, and is used… more | homepage

Contributing

Pull requests and stars are always welcome. For bugs and feature requests, please create an issue.

Building docs

(This document was generated by verb-generate-readme (a verb generator), please don't edit the readme directly. Any changes to the readme must be made in .verb.md.)

To generate the readme and API documentation with verb:

$ npm install -g verb verb-generate-readme && verb

Running tests

Install dev dependencies:

$ npm install -d && npm test

Author

Jon Schlinkert

License

Copyright © 2016, Jon Schlinkert. Released under the MIT license.


This file was generated by verb, v0.9.0, on July 19, 2016.