Ashiba

Ashiba is yet another Ruby-based scaffolding tool. It allows bootstrapping of projects using precreated templates. Templates for projects can be authored as separate Rubygems to allow maximum flexibility and central management.

Ashiba (足場) is Japanese for scaffolding and meand as a nod towards the Ruby language, which originated in Japan.

Install the tool with

gem install 'ashiba'

A generator for templates is included under the name ashiba-template. With this, you can create you own custom generators for Rubygems, Chef Cookbooks or whatever you want.

Every template has a configuration file in YAML which states some metadata along with the template's variables and their defaults like this:

variables:
  name: ''
  version: 0.1.0

All files within a template are parsed as ERB, so you can substitute things with variables (<%= name + ' ' + version %>) or execute Ruby code for looping or anything else (<% do_something() %>).

If you want to use the content of a variable in a filename, just enclose it in percent signs: %name%.gemspec.

All templates are directly configured as Gem file, so you can build them, install them and even publish them to your own private Gem repository or rubygems.org.

If you want commands to be executed after scaffolding your project, add them as a list under the finalize key of the YAML

Ashiba YAML configuration files reside in ~/.ashibarc or in /etc/ashiba/ashibarc.

You currently can only override template defaults with a file like

author: My Name
email: name@example.com

which will override the author/email variable defaults from the template. So if you have this in your home directory or the system configuration directory, all template executions will default to your name and email.

ashiba help Display all available commands

ashiba list List all available templates on the system

ashiba info TEMPLATE Display metadata about a template

ashiba create TEMPLATE PATH [--set variable:value] Scaffold a package Note that you can manually specify contents of variables. Lookup will happen in order /etc/ashiba/ashibarc, ~/.ashibarc, --set value or template default.

ashiba version Output version of Ashiba