project init (pi)

pi is a command-line utility to initialize projects. It is written in rust.

It is intended to provide something like cookiecutter, but faster.

Reasons to use pi: - You want to automate the process of starting a new project, in a language-agnostic way. - You want project initialization that's quick

Reasons to use pi over cookiecutter: - Templates are smaller. Define files you need in a .toml. - Fast. pi 30x faster than cookiecutter when rendering the sample vim plugin template. - pi uses mustache, a logic-less language that has libraries for many other languages. - pi can initialize a darcs, pijul, mercurial, or git repository inside your new project

Reasons to not use pi over cookiecutter: - pi does not fetch templates remotely. - pi uses logic-less templates, which are not as sophisticated as the jinja templates that cookiecutter uses.

Cool benchmarks (with Haskell's bench):

| Tool | Language | Time (vim example plugin) | Time (rust library) | | ---- | -------- | ------------------------- | ------------------- | | pi init | rust | 10.10 ms | 8.809 ms | | pi new | rust | 6.672 ms | 8.653 ms | | cookiecutter | python | 317.1 ms | 316.9 ms |

Installation

Binary releases

You can find binaries for x64 linux, ARM linux, and x64-windows on the release page.

Cargo

First, install cargo. Then:

bash $ cargo install project_init

You will need to use the nightly release for this to work; if in doubt run

bash rustup default nightly

Use

pi reads from $HOME/.pi_templates/ and the local directory. So, if you place a template in the $HOME/.pi_templates/idris/, you can initialize a project anywhere with

bash pi init idris treesod

There is a repo of templates for pi here.

You can also use pi with built-in templates. Currently pi has rust, haskell, vimscript, idris, julia, and python templates built-in.

bash $ pi new haskell really-good-project Finished initializing project in new-project/

Configuration

Global configuration is via the $HOME/.pi.toml file. The following is an example:

```toml license = "BSD3" # set default license to BSD3 version_control = "git" # initialize new repositories with git version = "0.1.0" # start new projects at version 0.1.0

[author] name = "Vanessa McHale" email = "vamchale@gmail.com" github_username = "vmchale"

put any custom keys you want below [[user]]

[[user]] website = "https://vmchale.com" ```

Project-specific config lives in $PROJECT_NAME/template.toml. The following is an example for a vim plugin:

```toml license = "BSD3" # overrides global value if set with_readme = true # add README.md

[files] files = ["syntax/{{ project }}.vim","plugin/{{ project }}.vim","doc/{{ project }}.txt"] # blank files directories = ["doc","syntax","plugin"] templates = ["vimball.txt"] # files to be processed

[config] version = "0.1.0" version_control = "darcs"

put any custom keys you want below [[user]]

[[user]] vimorgusername = "vmchale" ```

This will generate the following directory structure:

vim-plugin ├── LICENSE ├── README.md ├── doc │ └── vim-plugin.txt ├── plugin │ └── vim-plugin.vim ├── syntax │ └── vim-plugin.vim └── vimball.txt

Templates

pi uses mustache for templating, via the rustache crate.

You can find examples and help on the mustache page, or you can my look at my repo.