Boilerplate Configuration

Prept provides a range of boilerplate customization options to cater multiple use cases. These options are discussed in detail on this page.

Configuration File

Each boilerplate has a configuration file which is generated when the boilerplate is initialized through the prept init command. This is the preptconfig.json file. This file contains all the options used to customize the boilerplate.

The only required setting right now in this file is name which represents the name of with which the boilerplate is referred to while installing.

Boilerplate names must follow these rules:

• Can only contain alphanumeric, underscores, and hyphen characters.

• Must begin with letter or underscore.

• Not case sensitive

The following is a basic preptconfig.json file:

{
    "name": "basic-boilerplate"
}

Summary and Version

Boilerplate configuration provide two options for specifiying the boilerplate’s metadata: summary and version.

summary is a brief description of boilerplate and version is the version of boilerplate and both these options exist to aid commands like prept info which show information about a boilerplate.

It is generally a good practice to specify these two parameters if you intend to distribute a boilerplate for others to use.

Although Prept does not fully supports versioning as of now, version will be useful in future when proper versions of boilerplate are supported. Note that version can take version strings compliant with specification defined in PEP 440: https://peps.python.org/pep-0440/

Ignoring Paths at Generation Time

You can set ignore_path option to ignore certain files and directories from being part of the generated project.

This option takes an array of gitignore-like path patterns as strings.

For example:

{
    "name": "basic-boilerplate",
    "ignore_paths": [
        ".git/",
        ".vscode/*",
        "!.vscode/settings.json",
        ".env"
    ]
}

At the generation time, the .git directory will not be part of generated project and all content of .vscode directory will be ignored except settings.json.

Default Generation Directory

default_generation_directory is the name of directory where generated source files are place if user does not provide any output path through prept new -O option.

By default, the boilerplate’s name is used as default_generation_directory at generation time.

Note that if the directory does not exist, it will be created.

Templates

Prept provides a simple yet flexible templating system that allows generating files based on user provided values.

There is a dedicated page covering templates and all the related features in detail. See the Templating page.