Boiler is a small CLI tool that can help generate some boilerplate code for React projects. The motivation for this is to remove the "blank page" feeling when writing new components, and to help scaffold projects more easily.

Boiler is not on the npm registry at this time, as it is still a work in progress. To install and use locally please clone the repo and link the package.

gh repo clone johnend/boiler

After cloning run npm install and finally within the repo run npm link

Then run boiler from your project's root directory.

Your should run boiler for the first time in your front-end application's root directory i.e. in the same directory as your project.json file or .git folder.

On first run Boiler will:

• ask about your project setup (for the config file), and
  • the questions ask about whether you're using typescript, (s)css modules, storybook and where you UI components directory is (this should be relative to the root directory, which you should run boiler in),
• generate a config file.
  • if you are working on a team you can commit this file so that the settings are consistent for each engineer.

On subsequent runs:

boiler will ask you what the name of your component is and then generate a directory, and the components, defined in your config.

Currently Boiler will only generate all the files in the same folder i.e. it assumes your component folders are structured like this:

.
└── src/
    └── components/
        └── button/ --example
            ├── button.{j/t}sx
            ├── button.test.{j/t}sx --if test files are co-located (future
enhancement)
            ├── button.stories.{j/t}sx --if using storybook (configurable)
            ├── button.module.{s}css --if using scss modules (configurable)
            └── index.js -- if this is a sub-component of a UI component library (future enhancement)

• Have some logic to branch if boiler has been run before i.e.
  • As a web developer building a project, when running boiler after the first time and a boiler config file exists, then boiler should only ask for a name for the component and not ask the config questions. Then, after providing the name boiler should generate the appropriate files based on the config.
• Have Boiler find package.json and create the config as a sibling without needing to run Boiler in a specific directory for setup.
• Remove the need to run Boiler from project root directory (search up until .git is found)
• Look for a components directory and check, during setup, if this is what should be used