Idea: Projen for opinionated project setup and management

[riywo]

Summary

This is an idea to build a Projen type for Astro to provide the most opinionated Astro project setup and management for the new and existing users. With this new idea, a user can generate a new Astro project with highly maintained list of dependencies and configurations, just like npm create astro@latest but also keep synchronize with the upstream update as well as their customization because Projen manages all configurations as code, it's not a one-off boilerplate.

Problems

There are so many options that a user can pick to start a new Astro project e.g. integrations, frameworks, as well as eslint, prettier, VS Code. All are well documented and there are many great templates. However, it's not easy to keep their already created projects updated with documents and templates. Also, it's a tedious but error-prone work to re-configure the exactly same stuff for multiple projects like eslint.

Solution

Projen is a framework to solve the exactly the problems stated above:

projen synthesizes project configuration files such as package.json, tsconfig.json, .gitignore, GitHub Workflows, eslint, jest, etc from a well-typed definition written in JavaScript.

As opposed to existing templating/scaffolding tools, projen is not a one-off generator. Synthesized files should never be manually edited (in fact, projen enforces that). To modify your project setup, users interact with rich strongly-typed class and execute projen to update their project configuration files.
https://github.com/projen/projen

Projen type is a preset for these configurations. There are already react, react-ts, nextjs and nextjs-ts built-in types and it also allows to use external type as well.

With this idea, a user can use projen to create a new Astro project using a new astro type and keep the project configuration updated with high customizability e.g. add/remove integrations would be like:

const project = new AstroProject({
-  integrations: ["react", "tailwind"],
+  integrations: ["react", "vue"], 
})

Then, projen CLI can synthesize the whole astro.config.mjs file based on the given parameters and default parameters. It can cover this idea: #396

Drawbacks

This is redundant with the current role of npm create astro@latest, astro add and others. Therefore, we need dual maintenance.