Like I said in a previous blog post, I rarely blog but I run git init project-name pretty regularly. So here's a new such repo, bundle_certs. A simple shell script for bundling (in the correct order) SSL certificates.
How I start new projects
This little tool, along with ssl-ca and ssh-ca have some commonality in how I use them and this seems like a good opportunity to share. I keep my rc files (like .vimrc) in the rcfiles repo <https://git.shore.co.il/nimrod/rcfiles.git>_. However I don't install them as mentioned in the documentation. Instead I add them as Git sub modules and now I can be reasonably sure that when I clone the rcfiles repository, the aliases and sourced files mentioned in .bashrc are present. Here's how:
ssh cgit 'git init --bare /srv/git/REPONAME' git submodule add -b master -f https://www.shore.co.il/cgit/REPONAME
First I create the remote repository (most of you would probably use Github but I prefer self hosting). Then I add it as a Git submodule.
Repository boiler-plate
Truth be told, there are more line of tests, documentation, license, etc. than there is actual code in these repositories. It happened to a few times that I added something nice to a repository that I wanted to have in all (or most) of my other repositories and in new repositories going forward.
One solution I thought of is creating a base template repository that all others are forked from. The upside is if I change something in the base repository I can fetch it in all other repositories. The downside is not all repositories are the same (different license, programming language, pre-commit and git hooks).
Another option I know of are tools that manage a specific aspect of the repo, for example the license, or .gitignore.
A third option is using a project management tool like Cargo for Rust or Leiningen for Clojure. But not all aspects or languages have such tools.
The fourth option I'm thinking of is using a scaffolding tool, mainly Yeoman as it seems to the most popular one but its focus is on JS and webapps.
As of now, my plan is to try and maintain a base repo for certain project types and see how it goes (Yeoman would just take more time to get started with).