Dont write code! Write code to write your code!

Okay, funny meta statements aside, I noticed this week that in a side project I was doing a whooole lot of copy and pasting. To me this was a clear sign I could, and should, try to automate what I was doing. Clearly copy and pasting is pretty error prone and has caused me enough fuss that I try to avoid it when possible. As much as I would like to believe I am as consistent as a computer, unfortunately, I am not… Enter in Thor! There may be something better out there for this task but given I wanted to whip up something quick and always wanted to give Thor a go I figured why not. After all, if its good enough for Rails I am sure its good enough for me :).

A little background on the task at hand. The project is only a simple Rack API (which is why I am not extending or creating a Rails generator). When I am making a resource, for example Companies, I have have a good few files in common that in turn share a good bit of general functionality. Those files in the case of a Company are:

• company.rb (Model)
  • Creating a Grape::Entity
  • Setting up accessible attributes for both public and admin use
  • validations
  • relationships
  • scopes
  • extras like versioning and ordering
• Migration for the company table
  • Setting uuids and general attributes

• company_version.rb (Version class for use with the PaperTrail gem)

• Migration for the company_version table

• company_spec.rb (RSpec Model Spec)
  • attributes specs
  • validation specs
  • relationship specs
• company_factory.rb (Factory Girl Factory for the resource)
  • Nice field definitions based on the attribute type

This begins to look a lot like a scaffolding in Rails, so it made sense to use a Thor::Group, which will run through the Thor::Group sequentially running each method. Perfect! Just the thing I was looking for, why bother manually creating these files and filling it with a bunch of repeated boilerplate that I know I will need?

Thor makes it easy to generate files to your preference using familiar erb templates. This was both really cool and a point of pain for me. It was really awesome to have a common syntax to write these templates in, but holy crap was it ugly looking. A lot of the things I had to do, for example formatting line indentation, was really hacky and removed a good bit of nice formatting from the files in order to preserve nice formatting in the generated files. Take these criticisms with a grain of salt since there very well may be a nicer templating system for use in Thor or just a better way in general (if so leave me a comment about it!) I admittedly only did a quick Google search for an alternative to no avail. It would be really cool to see something similar to handlebars/mustache or jinja2 style adapted for use.

Overall the experience was very enjoyable and help make development faster and more consistent, exactly the goal hooray! Take a look at the code for all the details and feel free to ask questions in the comments below!