Iccode

To escape characters like double asterisks ** used for bold forward slashes // for italics double under slashes __ for underlining use double percent characters % to enclose them.

Note you need two percent characters from each enclosing side.

Command line generator for Meteor projects

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spend my free time trying to learn Meteor, a cool, simple but also smart and useful JavaScript web framework. During this time I find myself repeatedly doing the same things over and over again for each new project, such as:

• create a project’s root directory
• cd into the newly created directory and call the Meteor command line tool: meteor create project_name
• delete the three generated files (html, js and css)
• add two or three basic packages (mostly Bootstrap 3 and iron router)
• create various sub-directories inside root directory for public, tests, server, client, common libraries, client libraries, etc

Pretty boring and not lazy enough experience. Hopefully not something which it cannot be fixed with a little scripting. My humble solution comes in a form of a Bash script that does all the steps mentioned in the list above. One can simply invoke the script from the command line and provide it with a name for the project to be created. Even the project name is optional, if not given the script will create a new project named new_project.

Here is a screenshot of a newly created project:

I hope most things speak for themselves but for further clarification:

The script creates the project’s root directory
Deletes the Meteor generated files
Creates all directories and files
Writes some very basic code in some of the files, like the templates used to form the basic layout and some JavaScript
Finally adds iron router and bootstrap-3 packages
The generated code assumes that Bootstrap 3 will be used but it can be easily removed.

my_site is the name of the project and the root directory
my_site/client is the client side code, templates and stylesheets
my_site/client/lib is a directory where I put my subscriptions and some common utility code to run client side only

my_site/client/stylesheets are where all stylesheets files live. You can see the sticky_footer file which is used for Bootstrap sticky footers
my_site/client/stylesheets/style.css for further style customizations
my_site/client/views/layout contains partial templates for the head, the header and the footer while the main template renders all

my_site/client/views/index can be considered the home page

my_site/collections is a place to hold all of the collections
my_site/lib hosts common code that will run both on the server and the client, such as routes for the iron router

my_site/public for assets like images and the like
my_site/server is where all the server-side code lives
my_site/server/fixtures.js is a place to put collection fixtures for development

my_site/server/methods.js for the server-side methods

my_site/publications.js for collection publications

So if you want to skip some steps like me, you are welcomed to use the script which is available from Github. Put the script somewhere accessible from your user, I tend to maintain a ~/bin/ directory on my Ubuntu machine which is sourced by my .bash_profile. Finally call the script: meteor-project my_new_project_name_goes_here, that’s it.

• An example of a Flask application
• Command line tool for the Python Flask web framework

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