demo2

"makes" skeleton demo, customised questions and feature folders.

npx makes makesjs/demo2
# or
npx makes makesjs/demo2 a_project_name

Customised questions

Questions are defined in questions.js (optional), it needs to be in plain commonjs format ("makes" does not support any kind of transpiling babel/TypeScript).

"makes" only provides two kind of prompts.

text prompt

Like the first one in questions.js, a text prompt needs a "name" field and a "message" field.

{
  name: 'description',
  message: 'Description for this project (optional)?'
}

Optionally, you can also supply a "default" field like default: 'Default description.' which will be used as the default answer of this prompt.

"makes" also provides one default text prompt out of the box, prepended to your customised questions list. This auto prepend only happens when you did not provide a question asking for name: 'name'.

{
  name: 'name',
  message: 'Please name this new project:',
  default: 'my-app',
}

This means you can define your own question on project 'name' with customised message (the question end user sees) and customised default value. Your customised 'name' question does not even need to be the first question.

select prompt

In this demo, there are two single-select prompts, and one multi-select prompt. You can not change the default value of single-select, it's always default to first choice. You can mark default value for multi-select by setting selected: true on the choices.

Select prompt doesn't need a "name" field, answers from all single-select or multi-select become user selected features. Unlike other prompt tool (inquirer/enquirer/prompts), the answers in "makes" selections are unnamed. If user select 'nodejs', 'gitattributes', and 'babel', then the answers (selected features) are simply

['nodejs', 'gitattributes', 'babel']

comparing to the other common used shape from inquirer/enquirer/prompts

{type: 'nodejs', gitattributes: true, transpiler: 'babel'}

This list of selected features will then be used by "makes" to select relevant feature folders and do conditional pre-processing.

How "makes" uses the answers

"makes" groups answers for all text prompts into an object like this:

{
  name: 'my-app',
  description: 'Project description',
  author: 'Me'
}

These named properties are only for @echo pre-processing, you can find various @echo in files under common/ and nodejs/ folders.

"makes" groups answers for select prompts into a simple array called selected features:

['nodejs', 'gitattributes', 'babel']

This feature list is used by "makes" to

1. select targeted feature folders, the above feature list will select folder common/ and nodejs/.
2. use in condition expression.

• in questions themself (see the if conditions in questions and question choices).
• in conditional file, e.g. common/.gitattributes__if_gitattributes.
• in conditional content pre-process, e.g. in common/README.md // @if nodejs.

Condition expression

All conditional logic in "makes" are handled by same expression engine, you can use same expression

1. in question or choice of question.

   if: 'babel || typescript'

2. in conditional file (use and, or, not because &&, ||, ! are not friendly in file name)

   common/some-file.xxx__if_babel_or_typescript

3. in content pre-process

// @if babel || typescript
This only appears when user selected babel or typescript
// @endif

Feature folders

The top level folder common/, nodejs/ and ruby/ are feature folders, "makes" will choose some of them based on user selected features.

Every feature folder supplies a subset of the real project files, whey are merged together to form the final project.