Create Scala.js g8 template

Giter8 templates are used in a number of places and provides users with a simple way of starting a project within a selected framework. The templates can be used:

• via sbt: sbt new scalajs/scalajs.g8
• via coursier:

coursier install giter8
g8 scalajs/scalajs.g8

• and selected within Metals New Scala project command

All the available ScalaJS templates are rather old and certainly unofficial. I propose that we create a basic ScalaJS sbt project scalajs/scalajs.g8 with some basics that users (especially beginners) can use to get started. We could also setup Scala Steward for that repo and make sure that the template is in the default templates for Metals.

What are people’s opinions on this? What should we add to the template if we decide to create one?

[keynmol]

Things that tripped me over personally:

1. %%% (so at least 1 dependency in the build definition with a comment would help a lot)
2. Testing (seeing https://github.com/scala-js/scala-js-env-jsdom-nodejs and then through trial and error getting it to work really helped)
3. A pre-baked index-dev.html which targets the output (hardcoded?) of fastOptJS so that one can open it immediately
4. A cross-compiled module for JVM and JS (core module tested on jvm and js, and a frontend module?)

Can’t think of more things that would qualify for a minimal template.

I think the idea is fantastic 😃

P.S.: keeping dependencies up-to-date is a big one. There were several complaints of broken sample projects and templates on Gitter, and SS can help with that

[fdietze]

For reference, we have a fairly minimal Outwatch template with hot reloading available: https://github.com/outwatch/seed.g8

There is also a scalajs full-stack template to deploy to AWS lambda: https://github.com/fun-stack/example

Lots of experience and personal best-practices went into these, so there’s probably something to learn from.

In the fun-stack example, we even decided to remove g8 and make it a pure repo to be cloned (marked as github template).

g8 didn’t have enough advantages to keep it, while having the disadvantage to have a more complicated CI and scala-steward setup.

Doing a git clone or a sbt new is not very different in usability.