Additional actions

2.1.0 brings the concept of actions — see #28.

So far we have clone and remove. I can think of a few others that might be useful:

• rename — for moving files out of the way to prevent them being clobbered by clone
• replace — for replacing placeholder stuff in particular files, such as this TODO. Would need to come after a…
• prompt — get some user input. terkelg/prompts has some nice conventions we could adopt.

So you could do this sort of thing:

[
  {
    "action": "prompt",
    "questions": [
      { "type": "text", "name": "name", "message": "What is the project name?" }
    ]
  },
  {
    "action": "replace",
    "delimiters": ["<<", ">>"],
    "values": ["name"],
    "files": ["package.json"]
  }
]

then if you had a package.json like

{
  "name": "<<name>>",
  ...
}

it would get filled in. Not fully baked (maybe the replace action should run in the context of the prompt?) but you get the idea. cc @mhkeller if you have thoughts

[gustavnikolaj]

I have made a project scaffolding project that I use all the time when I need to test something quickly. It contains the set of tools that I find myself always copying around anyway. It’s already really useful, but I’ve had to include a self removing script into it, to do the bootstrapping. It can be seen here: https://github.com/gustavnikolaj/template-node

That means that I have to run it like so:

$ npx degit gustavnikolaj/template-node <targetDir> && node bootstrap.js

All I do in that script is to run some actions that execute npm commands to configure test and linting tools etc. As an example; I don’t want to depend on a fixed version of say eslint, so instead of including it in a package.json file in the degit source repo, I run a command at install time that installs the latest version of it.

The same thing goes for package.json - if I include it in the repo, I’d have to go in and update it after setting it up - but running npm init -y in my bootstrap script does the right thing (picking information about the writer from git config, and picking the name of the package from the folder).

The obvious way of integrating this behavior would be to allow an action type that allowed the module to include such a boostrap script.

I understand why you might not want to allow arbitrary command execution, but maybe it would be okay if we required the user to answer y/N in a prompt before execution.

Another solution could be to add an action that would allow you to execute commands in the context of the directory.

[
    {
        "action": "shell",
        "shell": "git init"
    },
    {
        "action": "shell",
        "shell": "npm init -y"
    },
    {
        "action": "shell",
        "shell": "npm install --save-dev eslint ..."
    }
]

That would cover most of my use cases. I would also like a way to transform files after the fact though. Something that would allow me to define a script target in the package.json file that got created after running the npm init shell command.

I don’t know how to do that with declarative actions, but maybe someone else has an idea? 😃

I’m happy to contribute PRs for any of these features if we can reach something that would work for us. I use my template project enough to justify improving it a little, and removing some of the ugly hacks 😃

[loreanvictor]

I was in need of this for rapidly creating some packages, so I made a wrapper over degit for this purpose specifically. it doesn’t have the “exec” action proposed here to avoid the security issues mentioned, thought it might be useful to some other people checking this thread (like me).