I’ve been digging in to making dotnet new templates and it turns out to be a remarkably capable bit of tooling.
It’s particularly useful when you want to build a load of similar microservices with their own git repos.
It can:
- Rename files.
- Rename strings (variables, class names etc).
- Preserve case style of renamed strings (through “derived” replacements).
- Create named command line arguments for your template string replacements, e.g.
donet new mytemplate --myswitch MyReplacementValue. - Exclude entire blocks of code and files based on switches that user can provide.
- Be installed an tested from a local folder with
dotnet new install <path>. - Be built into a nuget package and published on private or public feeds.
Importantly, there’s nothing in the way that it works that stops you from making your template code build/test/run.
And because it’s a CLI tool, if you want to an update an existing generated repo with a new version of a template you can just run it again with --force, and use git to pick through what changes you want to take into the generated repo.
This really takes a lot of the toil out of the copy-paste-modify you would have to do otherwise.
Learn more:
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/custom-templates
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/how-to-create-your-own-templates-for-dotnet-new/
See also: