basement

Basement is an extensible little tool for generating Python project scaffolding based on mustache templates and common data you provide in a config file. It's super straightforward.

Installation

pip install basement

Not much more to say!

Some Assembly Required (Usage)

Basement ships with two commands, basement and ment. ment is a shorthand for basement and thus is exactly the same.

Some assembly is required, and you'll have to break out a screwdriver. Basement is mostly useful because you can customize it! You can add your own templates (which we will go over in the next section) as well as configure filler data for all templates. We'll go over data the built in templates can make use of, as well as what the built in templates are.

Built In Templates

Basement comes with three built in templates:

• default: the default template (as you may have guessed) that is used when you don't specify a different one.
• app: a template defining a skeleton project using click to make a simple program with a command line interface.
• flask: a template defining a skeleton Flask website.

You specify which template to use with the -t flag.

ment foo -t app

The above example would use the app template to generate the foo project.

DATA

Templates aren't terribly useful until you fill them up with filler data. Basement uses a toml configuration file to define this data. Create a file called ~/.basement containing something like the following:

full-name = "Anthony Grimes"
email = "[email protected]"
github-user = "Raynes"
license = "MIT"

Let's take a look at a file in the default template. This is setup.py:

"""Your project's description"""
from setuptools import setup

with open('requirements.txt') as f:
    requirements = f.readlines()

setup(
    name='{{project-name}}',
    description="A project that does things!",
    version='0.1.0',
    long_description=__doc__,
    packages=['{{project-name}}'],
    author='{{full-name}}',
    author_email='{{email}}',
    url='https://github.com/{{github-user}}/{{project-name}}',
    license='{{license}}',
    install_requires=requirements
)

Notice all the {{}} things (mustaches)? These are mustache artifacts. When you create a project based on this template, those will be mapped to keys in your configuration file and filled in with the data present there. If I render based on my config file, I get this:

Anthony@lastlight:~/code/basement (master *)
$ ment foobar
Rendered template 'default' at /Users/Anthony/code/basement/foobar
Anthony@lastlight:~/code/basement (master *)
$ cat foobar/setup.py
"""Your project's description"""
from setuptools import setup

with open('requirements.txt') as f:
    requirements = f.readlines()

setup(
    name='foobar',
    description="A project that does things!",
    version='0.1.0',
    long_description=__doc__,
    packages=['foobar'],
    author='Anthony Grimes',
    author_email='[email protected]',
    url='https://github.com/Raynes/foobar',
    license='MIT',
    install_requires=requirements
)

Ignoring Files

Sometimes you don't want to touch certain files, in particular binary files. pystache, the library basement uses to render mustache templates, often does not like being fed binary files and you most certainly don't want huge files to be read into memory to be rendered! For these situations, basement provides a flexible mechanism for ignoring files. It works like so:

pass = ['path/to/be/ignored/.*']

pass can appear in your configuration and as each file is rendered, it is checked against the regular expressions using Python's re.search function. If any of the patterns match that file path, it is ignored and simply passed through.

Note that you can also use the special file extension .basement-ignore as well, as demonstrated in the next section.

Creating Templates

Basement is designed so you can create your own templates really easily. All you have to do is create a directory in ~/.basement-templates where all templates are stored and simply fill it with whatever files and content that you want, adding mustaches wherever you want to fill in data from your config.

One thing to note is that project-name is filled in with the basename of the output path you give basement. So if you run ment path/to/project, your project-name will be project.

Special Files

While writing your template (particularly if you wanted to write one to be included with basement), you'd likely notice that upon compilation setuptools tries to generate pyc files from your template py files and that'll likely cause errors (mustache isn't valid Python syntax for some reason ;)). The way around that is to add a special extension:

foo.py.basement-template

This will keep Python from compiling the file and basement will rename it when generating a project

Another important special extension is .basement-ignore, which tells basement to not try to render the contents of the file (though if mustaches appear in the file name itself, those will be rendered). This is useful when you have files that contain {{}} mustaches but you don't want them to be rendered. For example, jinja templates.

Template-Specific Configuration

You can add configuration specifically for certain templates and any keys present there that are also present at the top level override the top-level keys. You simply use toml sections like so:

full-name = "Anthony Grimes"
email = "[email protected]"
github-user = "Raynes"
license = "MIT"

[app]
license = "EPL"

Given this configuration, when you create a project based on the app template, license mustaches will be set to EPL rather than MIT. You can add configuration specific to your own templates by doing the same thing, simply adding sections with the name of the templates.

Updating Basement

When you decide to update your basement (perhaps you want to add a pool table), there are some updating mechanisms in place. When you run basement, it always wipes its templates and re-adds them. This means that you cannot make changes to the built in templates. If you want to make changes, you should make a new template.