Allow overriding or customizing the template files

[scottanderson42]

• [x ] I'd be willing to implement this feature

Description

Allowing the generator files to be modified automatically to include or omit features.

Motivation

There are any number of customizations we'd like to make to the project generators, such as creating a SAM template.yaml, adding specific sections or configuration to pyproject.toml, adding or modifying tasks in project.json, and so on. We could create our own generator that calls the @nxlv generator, but that seems wasteful and somewhat difficult if all we need to do is, for example, change the pytest configuration.

Suggested Implementation

Passing in a simple --template-files-dir that overrides the location of the template files. Or somewhat more complicated, only overrides the files that are present in the additional directory. This would introduce a minimal maintenance burden.

Alternate Implementations

There may be nx conventions for generators of which I am unaware, but some other approaches are:

• Add a features parameter to the generators that is used to toggle the presence of sections of the files or modify behavior, similar to addDevDependencies but generalized. Additional features would require code additions though.
• Ensure that each of the functions used to perform actions in the current generator are exported and composable by another generator. An example would be the project configuration object, which is both created and directly used in the project generator function. An exported function that returns a default configuration suitable for modification would be useful to call from another generator.

[lucasvieirasilva]

Hey @scottanderson42, I agree, currently, the project generator is not customizable enough, let me research a little bit, look at how Nx does for their own generators, and discuss with you more about it.

I agree that could be not productive if you write your generator trying to remove or modify the current generator, another suggestion might be a light version of the project generator that only generates a minimal number of files, in this way, it is easy to extend the @nxlv generator to your uses cases without any workaround to change what the base generator created.

Sounds good?

[scottanderson42]

Sounds good to me!

[lucasvieirasilva]

Hey @scottanderson42 sorry for the delay, I finally had the time to raise the PR that implements a new project generator, more flexible, I also used your suggestion to have the --templateDir CLI option to point for a custom template directory.

PR: #123

It also fixes #117 because I'm not installing the tomli anymore.

[github-actions]

🎉 This issue has been resolved in version 15.11.0 🎉

The release is available on:

• npm package (@latest dist-tag)
• GitHub release

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