Project Templates

The apex new command can be used to create a new project from either a basic github repository or from a TypeScript template generator. Programmatic templates are useful when your project needs outgrow a simple git clone or directory copy.

To create a new project from a template, use apex new:

apex new <template> <project-name>

When cloning from git repositories, you can use -p or --path to specify a subdirectory to use as the template source. This lets you keep examples and boilerplate in the same repositories as their main projects.

The following command uses the template located in the templates/nodejs directory of the repository housed at github.com/apexlang/codegen.

apex new https://github.com/apexlang/codegen.git -p templates/nodejs my-project

Template files and data

Any file ending with a .tmpl extension will be processed as a template with data substituted from the user or environment.

This example package.json from the nodejs template uses the name, version, description, and author variables to fill in the package metadata.

{
  "name": "{{.name}}",
  "version": "{{.version}}",
  "description": "{{.description}}",
  "author": "{{.author}}",
  "main": "dist/index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "eslint": "eslint src/service.ts",
    "build": "tsc",
    "lint": "./node_modules/eslint/bin/eslint.js  src --ext .ts",
    "fix-lint": "./node_modules/eslint/bin/eslint.js  src --ext .ts --fix"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "@types/uuid": "^8.3.4",
    "uuid": "^8.3.2"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@types/node": "16.4.10",
    "@typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin": "4.29.0",
    "@typescript-eslint/parser": "4.29.0",
    "eslint": "7.32.0",
    "eslint-plugin-import": "2.23.4",
    "ts-node": "10.1.0",
    "typescript": "4.3.5"
  }
}

The data variables can be defined in a .template file in the same directory as the template. This file is a YAML file and looks like this:

description: A nodejs template
variables:
  - name: author
    description: The project author
    prompt: Please enter the project author
  - name: description
    description: The project description
    prompt: Please enter the project description
  - name: version
    description: The project version
    prompt: Please enter the version
    default: 0.0.1