Sow

Tending Project Ecology

Introduction

Sow is a project scaffolding generator. Techincally it is a simple templating system based on eRuby, but it is designed with project templating squarely in mind.

Installation

Install using RubyGems as you would expect:

  $ gem install sow

There is no manual install at the moment. This will be fixed in a future release.

Usage

To start a new project simply use:

  $ sow myapp

You will see the following outout:

  Transferring reap/**/* to myapp/:

      create  CHANGES
      create  COPYING
      create  NOTES
      create  README
      create  admin
      create  admin/config
      create  admin/pkg
      create  admin/temps
      create  admin/temps/lib
      create  admin/temps/lib/myapp
      create  admin/temps/lib/myapp/about.rb.erb
      create  admin/web
      create  bin
      create  data
      create  doc
      create  doc/rdoc
      create  doc/ri
      create  lib
      create  lib/my-app
      create  meta
      create  meta/authors
      create  meta/created
      create  meta/description
      create  meta/email
      create  meta/homepage
      create  meta/license
      create  meta/name
      create  meta/repository
      create  meta/status
      create  meta/title
      create  meta/version
      create  test

  You need to fix the occurances of 'FIX' in the following files:

      README
      meta/description

Notice the mention of ‘reap/**/*’. By default Sow scaffolds-out a project layout suited to use by Reap build system. This is a good project layout even if you aren’t using Reap, but you may want to add a standard Rakefile. You can do that will Sow:

  $ sow ruby/Rakefile myapp

On the other hand if you just want an old-fashioned Ruby project, you can do:

  $ sow ruby myapp

You can change the default project type by editing $HOME/.etc/sow/default_type.

With you project setup, be sure to go over the contents and fine-tune it. In particular, edit the files that contain ‘FIX’ entries.

Sow can continue to be used for in-project templates. To do this, add templates to the temps/ or admin/temps directories, reflecting the same layout of your project. For example:

  myapp/
    lib/
      myapp/
        myapp.rb
    temps/
      lib/
        myapp/
          myapp.rb.erb
    meta/
      ...

Change into your project directory and run:

  $ sow

Project files will be generated based on the templates and metadata entries.

Hoe Users

Hoe users will notice that the sow command that comes with Hoe is overwritten, by Sow. Sow support Hoe projects, so there is nothing lost. Simply use:

  $ sow hoe [directory]

Or, to use Hoe as the default edit $HOME/.etc/sow/default_type to contain the work Hoe. Note, the Hoe scaffolding does not support the in-project templating system. To get that you need to create a meta/ direcroty in your project, and a place to store templates, eg. temps/.

Development

Copying

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

What's New

2008-07-21

Two Years?

Can you believe it's been two years? Over two years since I began this crazy eyed journey to create the ultimate Ruby build tool. If I had any idea what I was getting myself into I would likely have ran away screaming, thankful for having saved myself an extrodinarily amount of time. Thankfully I can finally say that day has almost arrived. And about time too. I was starting to get worried ;) The final result turned out to be just a single project, rather three came from the edeavor: Ratch, Sow and Reap.