skel

Scaffold a project by typing a tree.

A small bash utility. Type the file structure you want the way you'd sketch it on paper — indentation and all — and skel builds it.

$brew install mark-mcdermott/skel/skel

MIT · macOS & Linux · source

The idea

You type the tree. You get the tree.

You type

skel

$ skel
> src
>   main
>     index.ts
>   renderer
>     App.tsx
>     styles
>       global.css
> package.json
> vite.config.ts
> ▊

You get

tree

├── package.json
├── src
│   ├── main
│   │   └── index.ts
│   └── renderer
│       ├── App.tsx
│       └── styles
│           └── global.css
└── vite.config.ts

Press enter on a blank line to finish. Directories are inferred from indentation, so you only mark the empty ones. It reads piped input and heredocs too — skel < structure.txt.

In motion

A minute of it working.

Install

Three ways in.

Homebrew

Recommended.

$brew tap mark-mcdermott/skel

$brew install skel

Install script

Installs to /usr/local/bin.

$git clone https://github.com/mark-mcdermott/skel.git

$cd skel && ./install.sh

Make

Same, via the Makefile.

$git clone https://github.com/mark-mcdermott/skel.git

$cd skel && make install

Syntax

The whole ruleset.

Two spaces per indent levelor set your own with -i N
Directories end with / or are inferred from indentation
Empty directories must end with /
Paths stay relative/, ~ and .. are rejected
No tabs, no blank lines, no duplicate paths
Files are created relative to the current directory