Pi

A CLI project initialization tool written in C.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Dependencies
• Usage
• Contributing
• License

Installation

Feel free to use a pre-built binary from the releases page. For building from source, you will need a C compiler, CMake, and build system (GNU Make, Ninja, etc) of some kind to build this project. CMake will automatically determine which compiler and build system to use.

Linux users can use the build.sh script to streamline the process.

Run the following commands to build the project from scratch:

# Clone the repository to `./pi` and change current directory.
git clone https://github.com/uptudev/pi.git
cd ./pi

# Run the CMake configuration process, generating build files.
cmake .

# Build the executable
cmake --build . --config Release

# (Optional) install the executable to your system path
cmake --install .

This will build the executable with the filename pi on UNIX-like systems, and pi.exe on Windows. You can now build projects with the binary.

Dependencies

This tool uses various build tools and package managers to initialize projects. The following dependencies are required at runtime for the following languages to work:

• C/C++: No runtime dependencies.
• Go: Go
• Haskell: Cabal/Stack
• JS/TS: Node.js/Bun
• Lua: No runtime dependencies.
• OCaml: Dune
• Ruby: Rubygems
• Rust: Cargo
• V: V
• Zig: Zig

The dependencies will be slowly removed from this list if I implement their behaviour natively. Most of the dependencies enable complex initialization processes that are not easily replicated in C via argument passing, so they are used to streamline the process and are unlikely to be removed.

Usage

The base initializer is run simply via pi, but if the project name and language are given, this can streamline the initialization process.

pi
pi <project_name>
pi <project_name> <language>
pi <project_name> <language> -- [passthrough_args]
pi -l <language> -n <project_name> -- [passthrough_args]

Any arguments omitted will be prompted for by the program. The -- is used to separate the passthrough arguments from the program arguments; passthrough arguments are passed directly to the subsequently-routed initialization script.

For instance, if you want to initialize a bare-bones Node.js project in ./my_project, you can run the following command:

pi my_project node -- -y

To create a new Svelte project with Bun, you can run the following command:

pi -l bun -- svelte@latest

which will query the user for a project name before creating the project through the Svelte initialization script.

Contributing

This shouldn't really need too much in terms of collaboration, but feel free to send in a pull request if you have a feature you feel that I should add! I'm always open to adding languages and frameworks to the project initializer, as it has little overhead and is a good way to learn about new technologies.

License

This code is licensed under the MIT License.