Skeletal Project Creation Tool

Skeletal is a command line application that allows you to create a new project structure from a template. Typically, templates are software project skeletons ready to add logic and compile, and can be of any software language or framework where a template is available.

Skeletal alone is just a tool that doesn’t do much. It needs a solid selection of template packages to make it a compelling solution for developers' day-to-day needs. That’s why we try to make it as easy as possible to develop and publish templates. This guide explains how to go about both steps.

Many software frameworks today have online configurators or command line applications to create skeleton projects. What many do not have is a subtemplate feature for adding more specific class types like controllers, services, etc. that you end up creating manually or copying from another project. Skeletal allows you to easily start with one of these framework skeletons and add more of your common code and create a more useful project template that can also contain subtemplates as well.

The project templates are simply directory structures with whatever files in them that you want. Ultimately, the template project directories will be zipped up and placed in a repository which is a directory at a URL (file or http(s)) that contains a skeletal-manifest.txt with entries for each template version available. From there, Skeletal downloads the zips on demand and caches them in a local user directory (currently $HOME/.skeletal/templates).

Publishing templates previously included uploading the templates to your Bintray account. Since Bintray is no longer available, Skeletal has replaced this with creating a manifest file that contains the template metadata needed by the command line application for listing template information. This manifest file along with the template packages form a Simple URL based repository.

Command line application users should refer to the Application Users Guide.

Template developers should refer to the Template Developers Guide and the Template Testing Companion.

Much of these guides were copied from the original Lazybones project README’s and guides by Peter Ledbrook and updated for this Skeletal fork of that project.