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Blacksmith

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Blacksmith is a code generation tool which automates the creation of common files that you'd typically create for each entity in your application.

Blacksmith works nicely with the Laravel PHP framework but does not actually depend on Laravel or extend an Artisan task, it is stand alone. This allows you to use it for code generation from a template anywhere on your filesystem. In fact, while some of the generator specific template variables and post-generation tasks of the Intelligent Laravel Generators are Laravel specific; if the code you want to generate uses studly case and snake case naming, you could generate any code you wanted: Java, JavaScript etc.

Out of the box for the 1.0.0 release Blacksmith ships with a Laravel hexagonal architecture configuration and templates. Why? Because this is what I needed first.

Note: If you want to get started with the hexagonal architecture referenced above for a new app. Use Foreman with this example config (changing the 'from' paths appropriatley).

If you don't like the templates + configuration shipped with Blacksmith, don't worry you can make your own custom templates tell Blacksmith how to load them with a JSON config file. Then you just pass that config file's path as an optional argument to Blacksmith's generate command and presto, your custom templates and config are used.

Attribution: Blacksmith was inspired by, and even borrows some code from Jeffrey Way's fantastic MIT licensed Laravel-4-Generators package

README Contents

• What does it do
• Installation
  • Download the PHAR
  • Compile from source
  • Updating Blacksmith
• Usage
• Getting Started
• The Config File
• Templates
• Template Variables
  • Standard Variables
  • Generator Specific Variables
• Intelligent Laravel Generators

Out of the box Blacksmith ships with the following generators:

Single Generators (generates one file)

• model
• controller
• seed
• migration_create
• view_create
• view_update
• view_show
• view_index
• form
• test_unit
• test_functional
• service_creator
• service_updater
• service_destroyer
• validator

Aggregate Generators (calls 1 or more other generators)

• scaffold - calls all generators above with the given arguments

See optional move and permissions above.

To update Blacksmith, you may use the blacksmith self-update command.

Blacksmith generation commands have the following signature:

blacksmith generate {entity} {generator} [config_file] --fields="field1:type, field2:type"

In the example above the config_file argument and --fields option are both optional. {entity} is the name of the entity in your use case that you are generating code for, and {generator} is the generator you want to run.

To declare fields, use a comma-separated list of key:value:option sets, where key is the name of the field, value is the column type, and option is a way to specify indexes or other things like unique or nullable. Here are some examples:

• --fields="first:string, last:string"
• --fields="age:integer, yob:date"
• --fields="username:string:unique, age:integer:nullable"
• --fields="name:string:default('John'), email:string:unique:nullable"
• --fields="username:string[30]:unique, age:integer:nullable"

Please make note of the last example, where we specify a character limit: string[30]. This will produce $table->string('username', 30)->unique();

An example without placeholders might look like this:

blacksmith generate User scaffold ~/blksmth/cfg.json --fields="username:string:unique, age:integer:nullable"

Note: Blacksmith works from your current working directory, so if you have a template that gets written to a releative path, that will be relative to your current directory when you run Blacksmith. For Laravel this directory should be the application root.

While Blacksmith comes packaged with templates and base configuration file, it's likely you'll want to download the templates and customize them to suit your needs. This will also require you create your own config file which you can read more about in the Config File section.

As you begin to generate you may notice some interfaces and classes referenced in templates that were not generated. This is not a mistake. Any classes you only create one time are not generated by Blacksmith and can be obtained from Blacksmith-contracts.

The Blacksmith config file is written in JSON and has a specific format. Blacksmith will validate the file's format before use and provide errors if there is a mis-configuration.

The config file has a root level item for each single generator, and a root level item for config_type. The config_type element leaves the door open for subsequent configurations like "mvc" that would require a different collection of generator keys to be present.

Here is a partial view of the template, for a full template checkout the default here:

{
    "config_type": "hexagonal",

    "model": {
        "template": "model.txt",
        "directory": "app/models",
        "filename": "{{Entity}}.php"
    },
    "controller": {
        "template": "controller.txt",
        "directory": "app/controllers",
        "filename": "{{Entities}}Controller.php"
    },
    "migration_create": {
        "template": "migration_create.txt",
        "directory": "app/database/migrations",
        "filename": "{{migration_timestamp}}_create_{{collection}}_table.php"
    },
    "view_show": {
        "template": "view_show.txt",
        "directory": "app/views/{{collection}}",
        "filename": "show.blade.php"
    },
}

The key take away here is that for each singular generator there are sub elements for template, directory, and filename.

• template - the template file to use for this generator relative to the config file
• directory - the directory where the final parsed template should be written, relative to the directory you were in when Blacksmith was executed.
• filename - the filename the parsed template should be saved as

Note: if the destination directories do not exist Blacksmith will create them.

To skip a generator, set it's configuration to false. This can be useful to skip generating views when you're building an API.

    "migration_create": false,

You can also see in the partial config file example that you can use template variables provided by the generator in both the directory and filename values of the configuration.

Blacksmith templates use Mustache syntax, otherwise they are just plain text files. See below for the available variables that can be used.

The variables made available for each generator can be used in the generator template file or within the JSON config file in the directory, and filename values.

Each Blacksmith generator will always have the following standard variables available for use in the generator template or in the config's directory, and filename values.

Generator specific variables may only be available in certain generators because the use is specific:

form_rows Output Example:

[
    [
        'label' => "{{ Form::label('name', 'Name:') }}",
        'element' => "{{ Form::text('name') }}"
    ]
]

Note: with the exception of migration_timestamp all the generator specific variables are arrays. The content and count will vary as it is based on the --fields that were passed in.

Outside of template variables some of the generators have laravel specific actions that are taken after the template is generated and written out IF conditions are right. The table below describes each use case: