Facio

Formally known as Skeletor.

Facio: /ˈfa.ki.oː/ - Latin, meaning to make, do, act, perform, cause, bring about.

What is it?

Lets say you work in a company that turns around many different projects within a year but you use the same basic template for each project. You might copy and paste this around, it might fall out of date, things may get changes and improved but lost.

facio gives you the ability to create a standard template (or templates) for your projects so you can bootstrap in one single command.

Originally developed for Django projects you can use facio for any type of project.

Status

Version: 1.0

Supported Python Versions: 2.6 and 2.7

Facio is on the excellent Travis CI service.

- Master Branch (Most Stable Release)

- Develop (Under Development)

Stable Features

• Custom templates
• Git support for remote templates
• Multiple templates
• Jinja2 used for processing templates
• Python virtualenv creation
• Configurables using ~/.facio.cfg

Experimental Features

• Python virtual environment creation
• Python package installing (python setup.py develop)

Installation

For facio to be available system wide you must install as root:

• Easy Install:

$ sudo easy_install install facio

• Pip:

$ sudo pip install facio

• Manual:

$ git clone git@github.com:krak3n/facio.git
$ cd facio
$ sudo python setup.py install

Basic Usage

Facio used via the command line, after installation you should have a facio command available. Use help to see the options available.

$ facio -h

To create a new project its simple, cd into the directory you want your new project to live, facio will create the directory for you so you don't need to make it, for example:

$ cd /home/me/projects
$ facio -n hello_world

This will create a new hello_world directory at /home/me/projects and inside the default facio template will have been created.

Templates

Default Template

The default template is a Django based template that lives on GitHub here. It is not recommended you use use this template in production. You should create your own template that best suites your needes for your project. This template is just for illustration uses to see how you could use facio.

Facio Default Template on Github.

Custom Templates

First create your own template somewhere on your file system. To use it just tell facio about it by passing the -t or --template flag with the path to your template, for example:

$ facio -n hello_world -t /path/to/my/project/template

And if you want to use a git repository use pip style syntax:

$ facio -n hello_world -t git+git@github.com/path/to/repo.git

Of-course it doesn't have to be a Github repository, it can be any.

Advanced Usage

facio is flexible, and you can hopefully tailor it how you build out project skeletons.

Command Line Options

Stable

• -n / --name: Your projects name.
• -t / --template: Path to a custom template, use git+ to denote the path is to a git repository.
• -c / --choose_template: If you define multiple templates in the .facio.cfg use this flag to trigger a selection prompt instead of using the default template
• -s / --template_settings_dir: Custom settings directory name, see more info about this in the facio.cfg section.
• --vars: Custom variables for your templates, comma seperated var=value pairs, e.g: --vars var1=x,var2=y, would be accessed in teplates as {{ var1 }} and in dirs / file names as var1 / var1.ext (see section on this below)
• -h / --help: Show help

Expermental

• -E / --venv_create: Create a python virtual environment for this project.
• -P / --venv_path: Path to virtual environments home e.g /home/me/.virtualenvs.
• -S / --venv_use_site_packages: By default facio creates the virtual environment with the --no-site-packages argument to make a clean virtual environment, but if you don't want it do that use this argument and it will be omitted.
• -x / --venv_prefix: If you want to prefix your virtual environments name with something then use this option, e.g facio -n world -E -x hello- will create a virtual environment called hello-world.

Config File

Most things you can specify as command line options are also configurable in a facio.cfg file, this should live in your home directory and be prefixed with a ..

$ touch ~/.facio.cfg

Example Config

[template]
# The Default Template to user (can be a git repp, prefix with git+url_to_repo
default=/home/me/my_custom_template/
# Add other templates here, for example:
experimental_template: /my/new/template/
flask: git+git@github.com/my_flask_template.git

[misc]
install=0 # Experimental

# Experimental
[virutalenv]
venv_create=1
venv_path=/home/me/.virtualenvs/

Above is an example .facio.cfg file and contains a [misc], [virtualenv], and [template] sections. These sections and their allowed options allow you set defaults so when you run facio form the command line you need to keep specifying things like template path and virtual environment creation.

Available Options

• [template]
  • default: Path to your custom template, prefix with git+ to define git repository path.
  • other_template: Path to other template
• [misc]
  • install: 0 or 1 - Run setup.py to install project onto python path using setup.py develop
• [virtualenv]
  • venv_create: 0 or 1 - Create python virtual environment
  • venv_path: Path to python virtual environments home, e.g `/home/me/.virtualenvs/

Extra Variables

In templates

Of course project name is not always enough and in these situations you can send extra variables to facio to use in the template processing. For example:

$ facio -n hello_world --vars foo=bar

and in a template:

Hello World
foo={{ foo }}

As Jinja2 is used to render the templates, you can use conditons, and other Jinja2 functionality, for example:

{% if foo=='bar' %}
Foo is bar
{% else %}
Foo is not bar
{% endif %}

See the Jinja2 Documentation.

Renaming Files / Directories

You can even rename a directory and/or file by using double underscores around the variable name, for example:

- /path/to/template/
  - __foo__/
    - another.txt
  - __foo__.txt
  - some_file.txt
  - some_other_file.tx

The resulting structure would be:

- /path/to/template/
  - bar/
    - another.txt
  - bar.txt
  - some_file.txt
  - some_other_file.tx

To Do

Facio is still in early development and there is still a lot to do, this list is in order or priority:

• Simple Default Template Bundled with the Package
• Code refactoring (Template and Config classes specifically)
• Support for Mercurial and SVN repositories
• Write more tests
• Read the Docs Documentation
• Python 3 Support

License

See LICENSE file.

Authors

See AUTHORS file.

Special Thanks

To the Tech Team at Poke London and the awesome GitPython and Jinja2 libraries.

And thanks to Jack for helping me name it (and pointing out gramatical errors).

Contributing

Fancy helping out? Fork, commit, issue pull request :) Also please write some tests to prove your new bit of code works.

This project uses git flow, if you are not familiar please see Git Flow. Under Git Flow master is the most stable brach, develop is where active development occurs so please contribute using the develop branch.