Boilerplates and the new command

[anithri]

We need to look at the offerings we have for the new command and decide if they are worth keeping or updating. We should also work out a method for using create-react-app, as well as see if there are other worthy candidates.

At the same time we need to decide if we want to maintain the responsibility for this command.

[anithri]

If we are going to keep this functionality at all it has to be able to do create-react-app.

I'm personally inclined to keep it in, because it offers the best opportunities to customize choices for across the whole project. How do you like your propTypes. import your css or styled components? What api pattern do you use? Doing it ourselves, allows us to add blueprints that do once per project things like setting up a store or router. And it encourages creation of blueprints that work with the style of multiple boilerplates which in turn increases the usefullness of the tool.

It's a big step though, and I'm not convinced we should take it. Everyone wants a quick start boilerplate and everyone wants to understand everything going on under the hood and everyone has this one thing they want to do different than the boilerplate... Add to that the pace of innovation, which outstrips the abilities of maintainers ability to keep up. No one likes to do a poor job and its a big task for a small team.

If we do not do this. I think we absolutely should make packs of blueprints each targeted at the conventions and patterns of each of the major boilerplates. Further, effort should be made to make packs of boilerplates targeting the common addons and frameworks.

In either case I think that we should remove it for the 2.0 release and target a 2.1 release to add it back

[jamesr73]

If we move the CLI to yargs we can have an interim solution where we keep the new command as-is but 'hide it from help output'.

Using new for cloning boilerplate repos has some value. It would be good to specify those repos in blueprintrc rather than keep adding options to the new command.

For create-react-app, which I've been using recently, I'd be happy to run that command on its own and then just blueprint init (I'd probably even install blueprint-cli locally in my create-react-app app so that I have a locally bound version).

[anithri]

I see 5 main ways to define project boilerplates. It shouldn't be hard to account for all three as part of the bp new command.

1. Clone repo.
2. Run script. ('create-react-app')
3. generate project level blueprint.
4. fetch a file or url and uncompress.
5. Clone directory structure

But lets deal with that after all the 2.0 goals are met.