Rakegen

Rakegen is a Rake extension for generating and updating projects from templates. Give Rakegen a source and a target, and it creates a rake task that will make the necessary directories and copy the template files to the target. Rakegen processes .erb files by default, but you can register a template processing lambda for any file extension. Because Rakegen is Rake-based, you can add your own dependencies and actions to any target file.

Usage

generator = Rakegen.new("generate:app") do |gen|
  gen.source = "templates/application"
  gen.target = "/Users/matthew/dev/waves/thingy"
  gen.excludes << "**/*.yaml"
  gen.template_assigns = {:application_name => "thingy"}
  gen.executables = %w{ bin/waves-console  bin/waves-server }
end

This will define a task named, naturally enough, “generate:app”. If you define the generator in a rakefile, you can run it with rake generate:app. If you’re building your own executable, you can call it from Ruby:

generator.invoke

Rakegen asks you before clobbering existing files.