Prefab.el: Project Generation for Emacs

Prefab is a tool aiming to provide integration for project generation tools like cookiecutter.

prefab-demo-cut2.mp4

Currently only cookiecutter is supported though other tools such as giter8 and stack templates may be implemented in future (PRs are of course welcome!).

Setup

cookiecutter needs to be on your path and prefab-cookiecutter-python-executable needs to be set to a Python executable for which cookiecutter can be imported as a module. If you did:

pip3 install cookiecutter

You're fine on both counts and you can skip to installation, but if you did:

pipx install cookiecutter

Then you will need to:

;; The exe is probably here but you can check using 'pipx list'
(setq prefab-cookiecutter-python-executable "~/.local/pipx/venvs/cookiecutter/bin/python3")

Installation

Now you can install it from melpa:

(use-package prefab
  :bind ("C-c c" . prefab)
  :config
  ;; uncomment to set the cookiecutter python executable
  ;; (setq prefab-cookiecutter-python-executable "~/.local/pipx/venvs/cookiecutter/bin/python3")
  ;; Where you want project directories to be output
  (setq prefab-cookiecutter-output-dir "~/projects"))

Usage

Just M-x prefab, from there you are prompted with a list of your local cookiecutter templates (= templates you have used previously), alternatively you can paste in a new cookiecutter url e.g. https://github.com/audreyfeldroy/cookiecutter-pypackage.

Customisation

Variable	Description	Default
prefab-cookiecutter-config-file	The cookiecutter config file location, note this is optional but can save you some boilerplate, see the cookiecutter docs for more information. Only set this variable if your config file is not in ~/.cookiecutterrc.	Left to cookiecutter (~/.cookiecutterrc). Again, note existence of this file is not necessary.
prefab-cookiecutter-output-dir	Where cookiecutter should output projects	(format "%s/projects" (getenv "HOME"))
prefab-cookiecutter-python-executable	The path of the python executable to invoke for cookiecutter code	python-shell-interpreter
prefab-cookiecutter-get-context-from-replay	If non-nil pre-populate the prefab transient with context from the last run	nil

Contributing

prefab.el has been tested primarily on the most popular cookiecutter templates, please open an issue or PR if you find a template which doesn't work.