Blueprinter

Blueprinter is a command-line tool built with Bubble Tea that allows users to browse template files and directories from configured source locations and copy them to a target destination. It provides an interactive list of available templates from which users can select, and then copy the selected item to their current working directory or a specified target directory.

Blueprinter allows fuzzy search and selection from files in configured template directories.

Installation

Blueprinter can be installed using go install

go install github.com/ptdewey/blueprinter@latest

It can also be built from source if desired

git clone https://github.com/ptdewey/blueprinter.git
cd blueprinter
go build

Usage

Blueprinter is run by calling the executable from the command line.

# installed with go get (or from source with executable in PATH)
blueprinter

# built from source (not in PATH)
./blueprinter

To specify an output location, add an argument for the desired output location.

# add selected template to the 'example' directory
./blueprinter ./example

Configuration

Blueprinter reads configuration from TOML files, which specify the directories where your template files are located. If no configuration file is found, it falls back to default directories like ~/Templates or ~/Documents/Templates. Blueprinter will treat subdirectories as copyable unless they explicitly end with "-blueprints" (i.e. "gitignore-blueprints")

Configuration Files

By default, Blueprinter looks for one of the following configuration files in either the current Git repository root (if available) or in the home directory:

• blueprinter.toml
• .blueprinter.toml
• .blueprinterrc
• .blueprinterrc.toml
• blueprinterrc.toml

These files should contain an array with a template-sources key, which lists the directories where your templates are stored.

Example Configuration (blueprinter.toml)

templateSources =  [
    "~/Templates",
    "~/Documents/MyCustomTemplates",
]

In this example, Blueprinter will look for templates in ~/Templates and ~/Documents/MyCustomTemplates.

Default Configuration

If no configuration file is found, Blueprinter will try to use the following default directories within the user's home directory:

• ~/Templates
• ~/Documents/Templates
• ~/Documents/templates

If one of these directories exists, it will be used as the default template source. If none of the default directories exist and no configuration file is present, Blueprinter will panic and exit with an error.

Additional Configuration Options

When called with no arguments, blueprinter will match the filename in the directory, but there are many cases where this is likely not desired (i.e. for .gitignore files). To account for this, a .blueprint.toml file(s) can be placed in the templates directory (or a "-blueprints" subdirectory) to redefine the default output name of all files within that directory or subdirectory.

Assuming the .blueprint.toml file is in a directory called "gitignore-blueprints"

output_name = ".gitignore"

This would rename any files in our hypothetical "gitignore-blueprints" directory to .gitignore