Looking for a standalone, command line, code generator script

code-generation template-engine
Andrew picture Andrew · Sep 20, 2011 · Viewed 8.7k times · Source

I'm looking for a library or command line script that will allow me to create custom templates that I can generate from the command line. The ruby on rails scaffolding generator is almost identical to what I am trying to do. I would even prefer that it be written in Ruby (yet it cannot require Rails because I may not be using it on a Ruby application). What sorts of scripts like this are already available?

Answer

Chris Johnson picture Chris Johnson · Jun 3, 2013

I've also been on the lookout for something like this -- haven't found what I hoped for. The two approaches I've used instead have been acceptable. But I'm still hoping to find the real thing.

  • obvious, but sed for simple use cases

  • for medium-complexity use cases, if you can assume some version of Python is present on the machine, string.Template in the standard library works well. You could write a small Python script that uses this function, and since it is Python, tests / looping etc. that might normally be provided by the template engine could pretty easily be handled in the Python code instead.

  • I've just discovered Mustache (see http://mustache.github.io/). Seems like a solid, purpose-built solution. From its web site, Mustache has implementations in Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Erlang, PHP, Perl, Objective-C, Java, .NET, Android, C++, Go, Lua, ActionScript, ColdFusion, Scala, Clojure, Fantom, CoffeeScript, D, and node.js. If those choices suit your environment, you could script or compile Mustache support to be a command line utility pretty easily.

UPDATE 15-OCT-2013

Now that I've used Mustache for a while -- it's a great tool, simple but powerful.

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