🦆 duck-template

Fast, customizable Rust-powered project scaffolding — because smart devs don’t start from scratch.

duck-template helps you scaffold and manage projects using structured JSON configurations and flexible CLI commands. With variant support, remote configs, and dynamic flag injection, it gives you complete control over how projects and files are created.

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✨ Features

• 🧱 Template-based scaffolding using JSON
• 🏗️ Variants for different project layouts (api, web, cli, etc.)
• 🌍 Local or remote configs (URL or file path)
• 🧠 Unified flag parsing with dynamic injection into templates
• ⚡ Blazing fast — written in Rust
• 📦 Modular commands: init, create, and create-variant

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📦 Installation

cargo install duck-template

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🚀 Quick Start

🔧 Initialize a New Project

duck-template init --name my-app

This will:

• Create a directory my-app/
• Inject the project name into template files
• Use your local duck-template.json

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🏗️ Create From a Variant

duck-template create --variant api --config ./duck-template.json

With a remote config:

duck-template create --variant api --config https://example.com/template.json

With extra arguments:

duck-template create \
  --variant cli \
  --config ./template.json \
  --outdir ./output \
  --args author=Ahmed,year=2025

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✨ Create a New Variant

duck-template create-variant \
  --source ./template-source \
  --name cli \
  --description "Command-line app setup" \
  --config ./duck-template.json

This will:

• Package the folder into a new variant
• Append it to the config (if valid and writable)

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🧩 Configuration Format

Templates are defined in a duck-template.json file:

{
  "$schema": "https://zpgqhogoevbgpxustvmo.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/json/duck-template-schema.json",
  "name": "my-template",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "Reusable project setup",
  "outdir": "./output",
  "args": {
    "author": "Anonymous",
    "license": "MIT"
  },
  "variants": [
    {
      "name": "api",
      "description": "Express API starter",
      "files": [
        { "path": "src/index.ts", "content": "console.log('API ready');" },
        { "path": "tsconfig.json", "template": "tsconfig-template.json" }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

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🛠️ Command Reference

init — Create a New Project Directory

duck-template init --name my-app

Flag	Description
-n, --name	Project name (used for folder name and inside templates).

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create — Generate Files from a Variant

duck-template create --variant api --config ./config.json

Flag	Description
-v, --variant	Name of the variant to generate
-d, --outdir	Output directory (defaults to ./)
-c, --config	Local or remote JSON config
-a, --args	Key=value overrides for template variables (author=Ahmed)

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create-variant — Package a Folder into a Variant

duck-template create-variant \
  --source ./starter \
  --name basic \
  --description "Basic setup" \
  --config ./duck-template.json

Flag	Description
-s, --source	Source directory or file
-n, --name	Unique name for the variant
-d, --description	Short description of the variant
-c, --config	Optional path to an existing config to update

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📂 Output Example

Given:

duck-template init --name wiseman

With config:

{
  "name": "wiseman",
  "outdir": "./output",
  "variants": [
    {
      "name": "wiseman",
      "files": [
        { "path": "src/main.ts", "content": "console.log('{{name}} is wise');" }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Result:

output/
└── src/
    └── main.ts   // console.log("wiseman is wise");

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💬 Help & Version

duck-template --help
duck-template --version

Also works with subcommands:

duck-template init --help
duck-template create-variant --help

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🤝 Contributions

Pull requests, issues, and suggestions are welcome! Fork, tweak, and share your own templates.

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🦆 duck-template — smart scaffolding for smart developers.