stouch

stouch (stock touch) is a program that can create files and directory trees from pre-existing templates. It is also capable of performing basic text substitution on the contents of created files.

Installing

stouch requires the rakudo compiler. stouch should be able to run on both Unix-like and Windows operating systems.

stouch depends on the following Raku modules, which can be installed via zef:

File::Directory::Tree
IO::MiddleMan (for tests)

stouch can be built and installed via zef.

zef install .

Usage

stouch [options] file ...

This section is a rough overview of stouch's capabilities, please consult the manual for more exhaustive documentation. The manual can be accessed via rakudoc or the --help option.

rakudoc App::Stouch
stouch --help

By default, stouch will create files using templates determined from each file's suffix. When creating a file, stouch will copy the file/directory tree to the desired location, and perform any specified text substitutions on the created files.

For stouch to work, you must first set up a template directory. The template directory can be specified by either -t option or the STOUCH_TEMPLATES environment variable. If neither of those are specified, stouch will default to ~/.stouch. Each template in the template directory must be named after the file it is templating with the .template suffix. Here is an example template directory:

template-directory/
L raku.template
L rakumod.template
L c.template
L pl.template
...

This means we can use stouch to create the following files:

stouch test.raku test.rakumod test.c test.pl

When creating a file/directory, stouch will determine the template to use either by the desired file's suffix, or the -T option if it is specified.

stouch can do text substitutions via substitution targets. A substitution target is a string with alphanumeric or underscore characters enclosed in two curly brackets, like this:

{{this}} <-- is a substitution target

Substitution targets can optionally be substituted via the -s option, which allows you to specify the text you would like to replace a substitution target. For example, say you have this template file:

This is a {{type}} file!
It does {{whatever}}!

and you use stouch with -s "type => text, whatever => stuff", the created file would look like this:

This is a text file!
It does stuff!

stouch can also perform text substitutions on file paths.

# This will create a file named foo.raku
stouch -s "script => foo" {{script}}.raku

These path substitutions can also apply to children paths of a template directory.

Copyright

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0.