What is Scaffold?

Scaffold is a project generation tool similar to cookiecutter written in Go that leverages the Go template engine to generate projects from a template. It is designed to be used with git or the local file system with a built in "scaffold" management system for versions and templates.

What set's Scaffold apart from projects like cookiecutter is the ability to define reusable scaffolds called template scaffolds within a project to help bootstrap code changes in existing projects.

Use Cases

• Whole Project Scaffolding

  Scaffold is great for generating whole projects from a template. This is useful for:

  • Bootstrapping a new project
  • Creating a new API using a standard layout
  • Create a new microservice using company standards

• Templates within Projects

  You're able to use a .scaffolds directory within a project to define a scaffold that can generate files in multiple locations around your project and even inject code into existing files. This is useful for generating boilerplate starter code for:

  • React/Vue/Angular/... components
  • Ansible Roles
  • CRUD API endpoint stubs
  • Other commonly structured code folders

• Shared remote templates

  Templates that add files to a project don't have to be nested under .scaffolds. For example, if you are building a tool which users can add to existing project and that tool needs configugration, you can host those tool's scaffolds in a remote repository

See the examples folder for some examples of how to use Scaffold.

Features

• Generate projects from a template
• Git based scaffolds (public and private)
  • Update scaffolds with scaffold update
  • List scaffolds with scaffold list
• Generate files in multiple locations within an existing project
• Pre/Post Messages defined in the scaffold (supports markdown)
• Alias support for shortening common commands
• Shortcuts for common prefixes (e.g gh: for github.com)
• Conditional Prompting based on user input
• Inject snippets into existing files with Scaffold Templates