Improvements to the Generator

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#80 5 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
20/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
express, javascript, nodejs
Domain
cli, tooling

Research direction

Start by reviewing the current generator executable and template structure, then read the linked preference-file example. Clarify the desired configuration options, template customization model, input/output behavior, and whether related projects already exist; the issue does not yet define a concrete completion target.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

ideas

After a discussion (quite a while ago) with @dougwilson I've been thinking about how we could improve the boilerplate generator for express. The generator itself hasn't really gone through an overhaul since it was converted from a short script that concat'd a bunch of source together and outputted some files into a nice set of templates with improvements to the file structure.

With some large changes to the generator I think we can make express a lot better as a starting point for building your own tailored framework. Right now the choices you have for the generated code are fairly shallow. I think we can expand these choices to include what a lot of people are using express for. The changes are fairly large though.

Here is what I am thinking:

  • A preference file, allowing you to configure every aspect of the generated code. Here is an example
  • A set of templates that you can modify to generate code in your exact style.
  • The executable would take the preferences and templates as input and output an Express app.

Obviously there are a lot of specifics missing and the example preference file is fairly magic looking. So before I go much further with the idea I wanted to test the waters to see if this idea had any merit. Also there might be other ideas / projects underway that do this?

Dominant language
JavaScript
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Forks
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