Automate creating projects with npm initializers

Want to speed up your development workflow? 🚀

What if you could automate creating new projects? 🤖

Like create-react-app ⚛️ but what about for other kinds of projects?

You’re probably familiar with this tedious process 😞 — and it’s especially tedious for monorepos!

• npm init my-app
• cd my-app
• npm add whatever
• npm add -D lerna @babel/code @babel/preset-env
• mkdir src
• touch src/index.js
• touch babel.config.js
• mkdir packages
• mkdir packages/one
• mkdir packages/two
• code .
• Edit babel.config.js
• etc.

Well, good news! 🎉

It turns out npm init has a feature where it can execute “initializer” packages named create-* on npm.

So all you have to do is just run a command like:

$ npm init babel my-app

This will create your project based on the script in the package create-babel.

So naturally, I’ve created several of my own initializers:

• create-babel npm init babel my-app
• create-babel-monorepo npm init babel-monorepo my-app
• create-babel-typescript npm init babel-typescript my-app
• create-babel-typescript-monorepo npm init babel-typescript-monorepo my-app
• create-bookmarkleet npm init bookmarkleet my-app

You can find more of mine on GitHub.

If you dig into the source, you’ll notice many of initializers use my utility base-create that makes it easier to write them. I also wrapped that in base-create-monorepo to help write them for monorepos.

And there’s a healthy, open-source community with many more initializers available! Try searching for create-* on npm.

Onward & upward! 🚀