laoban-dev

Templates

Each project has a template. This template tells us ‘what sort of project it is’. For example we might want the following:

• Java projects (for the backend)
• Typescript non react projects (which are libraries)
• Typescript react projects (for the front end)

Here we would have three templates. java, typescript and react.

What do templates do…

A template is a list of files that will be copied into our project every time we execute the laoban update command. The files can be configured to be modified during the update command

This allows us to manage all these files centrally, but allows us to have local variations For example. Typical files in a template include

• project.json
• pom.xml
• babel.config.json
• ts-config.json

Why are they cool

As soon as you want to upgrade a version of a dependency in many projects, you discover the joy of the templates. They are ‘managed’ in the template, type laoban update and it is the same as editing the package.json everywhere.

With them it is now trivial to create sub libraries which is great for increasing code quality (libraries typically force us to create nice interfaces and decouple our code). Normally this is painful in the javascript ecosystem

Templates and package.details.json

Often the files in the template will be modified by the data in the package.details.json file. For example the name of the project is needed in pom.xml and project.json.

Templates are specified in the laoban.json file

In the laoban.json file we have a templates section. For example:

{
  "templates": {
    "javascript":       "./templates/javascript",
    "typescript":       "@laoban@/templates/typescript_405",
    "typescript_react": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phil-rice/laoban/master/common/templates/typescript_react/.template.json"
  }
}

• The first is the declaration of a local template that lives in the monorepo.
• The second is a url. The @laoban@ is a shortcut for https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phil-rice/laoban/master/common
• The third is also a url

The file .template.json

The url specified in the templates section of laoban.json has ‘template.json’ appended to it. There should be a file defined there. Typical contents might be:

{
  "files": [
    "tsconfig.json",
    {
      "file":        "@laoban@/templates/typescript/.npmrc",
      "target":      ".npmrc",
      "postProcess": "checkEnv(NPM_TOKEN)"
    },
    {
      "file":   "@laoban@/templates/typescript/babel.config.json",
      "target": "babel.config.json"
    },
    {
      "file":   "@laoban@/templates/typescript/jest.config.json",
      "target": "jest.config.json"
    },
    {
      "file":        "package.json",
      "type":        "${}",
      "postProcess": "jsonMergeInto(@laoban@/templates/javascript/package.json,@laoban@/templates/typescript_405/package.json)"
    }
  ]
}

Let’s look at these in more details

Just a filename

  {
  "files": [
    "tsconfig.json"
  ]
}

The same url prefix is put in front of this, and that file is ‘just copied’. In this example. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phil-rice/laoban/master/common/templates/typescript_405/tsconfig.json is copied to tsconfig.json

file and target

    {
      "file":   "@laoban@/templates/typescript/babel.config.json",
      "target": "babel.config.json"
    }

In this example the file is copied from the file to the target. The file is a url or actual file, and the target is where the file is to be copied to in the target project

file/target and post process

Sometimes we want to ‘post process’ the file. There are currently three post processors

• json. This will turn the file into json and backend. This has the property of getting rid of any duplicates and pretty printing the file
• checkEnv(...). This checks that the environment variable in the bracket exists. This gives your user a much nicer experience as the error message tells them they need to set up their environment variable
• jsonMergeInto(file1,file2) The parent files are loaded and then there is a json merge. This makes it very easy to make ‘master files’ and just record the small differences

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