hygen is the simple, fast, and scalable code generator that lives in your project.

Features

✅ Build ad-hoc generators quickly and full on project scaffolds.
✅ Local generators per project (and global, if you must)
✅ Built-in scaffolds to quickly create generators
✅ Full logic templates and rendering
✅ Prompts and flows for taking in arguments
✅ Automatic CLI arguments
✅ Adding new files
✅ Injecting into existing files
✅ Running shell commands
✅ Super fast, constantly optimized for speed

New in hygen v4.0.0: a positional NAME parameter. Now you can use $ hygen component new MyComponent instead of $ hygen component new --name MyComponent.

Used By

Quick Start

Hygen can be used to supercharge your workflow with Redux, React Native, Express and more, by allowing you avoid manual work and generate, add, inject and perform custom operations on your codebase.

If you're on macOS and have Homebrew:

$ brew tap jondot/tap
$ brew install hygen

If you have node.js installed, you can install globally with npm (or Yarn):

$ npm i -g hygen

If you like a no-strings-attached approach, you can use npx without installing globally:

$ npx hygen ...

For other platforms, see releases.

Initialize hygen in your project (do this once per project):

$ cd your-project
$ hygen init self

Build your first generator, called mygen:

$ hygen generator new mygen

Loaded templates: _templates
       added: _templates/mygen/new/hello.ejs.t

Now you can use it:

$ hygen mygen new

Loaded templates: _templates
       added: app/hello.js

You've generated content into the current working directory in app/. To see how the generator is built, look at _templates (which you should check-in to your project from now on, by the way).

You can build a generator that uses an interactive prompt to fill in a variable:

$ hygen generator with-prompt mygen

Loaded templates: _templates
       added: _templates/mygen/with-prompt/hello.ejs.t
       added: _templates/mygen/with-prompt/prompt.js

Done! Now let's use mygen:

$ hygen mygen with-prompt
? What's your message? hello

Loaded templates: _templates
       added: app/hello.js

Use a template repo

Want to start from a repo?

$ hygen init repo antfu/vitesse --to my-folder

Want to start from an existing repo on an existing project?

$ mkdir your-project && cd your-project
$ hygen init repo antfu/vitesse

What's Next?

Go to the documentation to get to know the rest of Hygen and generators.

If you're in a hurry:

To learn how to edit generator templates, look here
To see how to use generators look here
Take a look at the ecosystem and tooling built around Hygen.

A Different Kind of a Generator

hygen is a scalable generator. It has developer and team ergonomics as first priority.

It avoids "blessed" or dedicated projects that codifies code generation, which before you know it, become a product you build, needs testing, CI, separate pull request reviews, and ultimately sucks up your time and becomes this super hated thing no one likes to touch anymore.

Plus, since they are not the product you are building they become notoriously hard to reason about.

Scratch Your Own Itch

Because hygen templates live in your project, it cuts the time from having an itch for generating code (Redux, anyone?) in your current project to code generated with it and others benefiting from it.

Template Locality

hygen picks up a local _templates folder at any folder level of your project you're working from.

This is important because:

Templates are project-local. A git clone of the project fetches all generators as well.
Different generators can be tucked in different parts of the project, making it contextual.
Template locality is scalable; different teams can maintain different generators.
When you change your code, you can make changes in the template and pack in the same commit, to be reviewed and merged in the same PR (as opposed to installing different "plugins" or different templates from out-of-repo places).

And yet, if you don't like project-local templates:

You can have a global _templates folder (maybe a central git repo you maintain?) by populating an environment variable HYGEN_TMPLS
You can build a custom generator of your own with hygen at its core, and pack your own templates with it.

Folder Structure is Command Structure

The templates folder structure maps directly to the command structure:

$ hygen worker new jobrunner

For this command, hygen worker new maps to _templates/worker/new and all files within worker/new are rendered.

Template parameters are given with --flag VALUE, as many as you'd like. In this example we've set a parameter named name to the value jobrunner.

Subcommands

A subcommand is a file inside a your folder structure. So if the structure is this:

_templates/
    worker/
      new/
        index.html.ejs
        setup.html.ejs

And you only want setup, y

Hygen

Install / Use

README