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Laravel file generator

This is a Laravel package which helps you automate creation of files.

Benefits

• If you create a type of file frequently, you can automate it and improve productivity.
• Prevent "context switching" where you lose focus for 30 seconds while you create new files, directories and populate it with boilerplate.
• Comes with several built-in boilerplates. Easy to share your own as github gists.
• All boilerplates and generators are part of your repository, letting you share standard templates with your team.
• Find things like artisan make:model and artisan make:controller useful? You can make your own.
• All boilerplates can be written as blade templates.

Quick Start

Step 1: Install the package

Step 2: Publish the "boilerplates" - an included set of useful boilerplates like PHP Classes.

Step 3: You can list all the installed boilerplates

Step 5: You can create a php class now:

The generator php:class creates one by default in. You can now open app/Support/Helpers/AwesomeHelper.php

Step 6: Create your own template:

Understanding Boilerplate Template

Open the file created by Step 6. You will see something like this:

There's two parts to the file, separated by ---.

• The top part is the configuration of how the template should behave, and also specifying parameters
• The bottom part is the actual template which will be.

The configuration object

Let's take a closer look at this config object:

This should be valid JSON. The key name is the name of the template used for generate:list. Not to be confusued with the $name variable.

Setting Output Path

If you try to run the template with something like:

The output path here will be: edit/me/foo/bar.txt. $name contains the second parameter, and even the strings can use blade so {{ $name }} will produce the path.

Parameters

Parameters allow you to customize and change the content of the file. For example, here we have myParam. So running this boilerplate with

Will result in the text file:

Flag Parameters

Here's a simple template (some elements omitted for brevity).

Now we can run it like:

Required Parameters

Optional Parameters

You can recognize the if and endif as blade conditional structures. If authorName is set like:

Then the value is set to "John". Else it's null.

Default Values

If you set the parameter to anything except flag or optional or required it's considered a default value.

The value is going to be set to 2017 unless specified otherwise.

Tips for writing boilerplates

• A template like vue__component.boilerplate.txt will become vue:component for cleaner organization. You can use __ in your own templates.
• Important: Pass a --dry-run flag like php artisan generate --dry-run mytemplate foo/bar --myParam "paramvalue" to display the output in console. This lets you iterate and fix any potential issues without creating files.
• You can use most of laravel's helper functions and even some other PHP classes with some advanced blade and the @php directive
• You can use paths like foo/bar/{{ $name }} and FileGenerator will automatically adjust directory separators on windows.

If you're using this tool to generate blade files, using keywords like @section and @extends might not work. Instead use @@section and @@extends

For example:

Formatter

Sometimes you might need to do some string manipulation. Later versions of File Generator will contain more comprehensive string manipulation later.

Camel-case, Snake-case, etc

You can use Laravel's built in helpers for things like camel_case and others.

Basename from path

If you've got something like app/Support/MyHelper.php and want to extract MyHelper you can use Format::baseName ($path) which extracts a classname like entity, ignoring any file extension.

Getting a namespace from path

Namespaces are a bit tricky, since they need to render forward-slashes. FileGenerator contains a simple format helper which can generate a namespace from a given file path. It uses the laravel app directory and App namespace by default.

Example: PHP Class generator

First, be sure that you've run php artisan vendor:publish --tag='boilerplates' and check app/resources/boilerplates/php__class.boilerplate.txt

The example should be pretty self explanatory. But can illustrate that even a little blade templating can go a long way.