mikeevmm / boyl

Quickly create boilerplate projects and templates.

boyl

boyl is a command-line tool written in Rust to manage template folders.

boyl can copy existing folders (with support for glob-like ignore patterns) to a persistent location, and provides a terminal UI to instantiate new copies of these templates, list the available templates, and remove templates.

🔗 Installation 🔗 Is it any good? 🔗 FAQ 🔗 Contributing 🔗 Support 🔗 License

Installation

You can find pre-built binaries in the releases page.

To make boyl accessible from the command-line, download one of the releases to a known place (for example, ~/boyl/boyl-0.1.x), and either add that directory to your $PATH, or create a link to the executable in a directory that is already in your $PATH (for example, ~/bin):

ln -s "$HOME/boyl/boyl-0.1.x" "$HOME/bin/boyl"

You can confirm that boyl is available by running

boyl --help

If you wish to build boyl from source, you can do so with cargo:

cargo install --git https://github.com/mikeevmm/boyl

This will make boyl available from the command-line immediately.

Is it any good?

Yes.

FAQ

Why should I use boyl rather than cargo/npm/gradle/etc?

boyl is more high-level, but does not mean to replace these tools in the first place. Language/application-specific apps to create new/boilerplate projects will always (probably) be better picks to create new projects in their specific domain, but they are not general purpose, and boyl can customize and build on top of them (for example, you may wish to have a specific folder structure set up, or more code than that generated by default).

Regardless, boyl fills a void for languages that do not provide these tools (cough C), without specializing too much.

Why shouldn't I just cp my templates?

You can if you want to. boyl is just a glorified cp with some niceties on top, anyway.

Where are the template folders saved to?

By default, boyl uses the dirs crate to find your OS's configuration directory (e.g., ~/.config), and saves its settings and folders to <configuration directory>/boyl.

You can change the used directory by setting the BOYL_CONFIG environment variable. Be aware that previous configuration will be lost unless you manually move existing configuration files to the new location.

The copy operation is very slow.

I have tried but failed to speed it up, and could not find better approaches online. If you know what should be done, please open an issue or (preferably) a pull request.

(Be aware that exclusion patterns mean you have to traverse the whole copied directory; you can't just copy the base directory file.)

Why doesn't boyl use NCurses?

To maximize portability; like the rest of my command line utility, I wanted boyl to be usable in a setting where you only have user permissions (no sudo).

After writing plenty of Rust, I know which choice I'll make next time. (Using NCurses.)

This code is a little janky.

Sorry about that. It's my first project in Rust. You can check out template, which is boyl's predecessor written in Python, and is substantially less janky code-wise (and tiny in comparison).

Why isn't boyl as tiny as template?

Because template doesn't have a TUI, but also because you wouldn't believe the amount of code needed to accomplish in Rust what you can do in a few lines in Python. (I understand why this is, but it is matter-of-fact.) I am not excellent at low-level programming, thus there might be some overhead from that as well --- I'll leave that for you to decide.

Isn't this basically /insert existing piece of software/?

Probably. That happens a lot, where I want some tool that does some thing and there is already an existing tool to do that thing that I didn't go looking for. Usually, however, I want that tool to have basically no dependencies (so I can curl and ln it in both personal and work computers and be done), and have a specific vision for what I want the tool to do and behave. So, instead of finding and learning how to use tool X, I just try my hand at doing it.

I do not endorse this approach, frankly.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome, and preferred to issues. I cannot guarantee that I will be able to address issues. Please be polite.

License

boyl is licensed under a GNU General Public License v2. This informally means that:

You may copy, distribute and modify the software as long as you track
changes/dates in source files. Any modifications to or software including
(via compiler) GPL-licensed code must also be made available under the GPL
along with build & install instructions.

See LICENSE for the full text.

Support

Getting donations, no matter how small, lets me know that people use and appreciate the software I've put out. (Enough so to pay for it.)

If you like boyl, please consider buying me a coffee.