Templates {#templates}

In projects with an established architecture, developers might want to bootstrap new components or features that are consistent with the project. With tuist scaffold you can generate files from a template. You can define your own templates or use the ones that are vendored with Tuist. These are some scenarios where scaffolding might be useful:

• Create a new feature that follows a given architecture: tuist scaffold viper --name MyFeature.
• Create new projects: tuist scaffold feature-project --name Home

[!NOTE] Non-opinionated

Tuist is not opinionated about the content of your templates, and what you use them for. They are only required to be in a specific directory.

Defining a template {#defining-a-template}

To define templates, you can run <LocalizedLink href="/guides/features/projects/editing">tuist edit</LocalizedLink> and then create a directory called name_of_template under Tuist/Templates that represents your template. Templates need a manifest file, name_of_template.swift that describes the template. So if you are creating a template called framework, you should create a new directory framework at Tuist/Templates with a manifest file called framework.swift that could look like this:

import ProjectDescription

let nameAttribute: Template.Attribute = .required("name")

let template = Template(
    description: "Custom template",
    attributes: [
        nameAttribute,
        .optional("platform", default: "ios"),
    ],
    items: [
        .string(
            path: "Project.swift",
            contents: "My template contents of name \(nameAttribute)"
        ),
        .file(
            path: "generated/Up.swift",
            templatePath: "generate.stencil"
        ),
        .directory(
            path: "destinationFolder",
            sourcePath: "sourceFolder"
        ),
    ]
)

Using a template {#using-a-template}

After defining the template, we can use it from the scaffold command:

tuist scaffold name_of_template --name Name --platform macos

[!NOTE] Since platform is an optional argument, we can also call the command without the --platform macos argument.

If .string and .files don't provide enough flexibility, you can leverage the Stencil templating language via the .file case. Besides that, you can also use additional filters defined here.

Using string interpolation, \(nameAttribute) above would resolve to {{ name }}. If you'd like to use Stencil filters in the template definition, you can use that interpolation manually and add any filters you like. For example, you might use { { name | lowercase } } instead of \(nameAttribute) to get the lowercased value of the name attribute.

You can also use .directory which gives the possibility to copy entire folders to a given path.

[!TIP] Project Description Helpers

Templates support the use of <LocalizedLink href="/guides/features/projects/code-sharing">project description helpers</LocalizedLink> to reuse code across templates.