Skeleton configuration

Skeletons can carry additional configuration in a mandatory .kickoff.yaml file. The following sections explain the structure of the file and the purpose of the fields that can be configured in it.

1. The .kickoff.yaml file
   1. General file structure
   2. The description field
   3. Configuring default values
2. Next steps

The .kickoff.yaml file

~/kickoff-skeletons
└── skeletons
    └── myskeleton
        └── .kickoff.yaml

The .kickoff.yaml needs to be present within a skeleton directory for kickoff to be able to identify it as such.

The file has the following special properties:

• Acts as a marker to identify the root of a project skeleton.
• May contain metadata about a skeleton.
• May contain defaults for values used within templates.
• Defining metadata and value defaults is totally optional, thus a valid .kickoff.yaml can also be empty.

General file structure

The following code block shows the contents of an example .kickoff.yaml:

---
description: |
  Some optional description of the skeleton that might be helpful to users.

  Upon project creation you may want to pass `--set travis.enabled=true` if you
  want to enable travis-ci for your project!
values:
  myVar: 'myValue'
  travis:
    enabled: false

The individual config options will be explained below.

The description field

This is the place where project skeleton creators may put some useful description of the skeleton and its usage. E.g. it can be used to explain the meaning of the skeleton values and give some examples of how to customize them.

Users can view the description of a skeleton by inspecting the skeleton:

$ kickoff skeleton show <name-of-the-skeleton>

Configuring default values

You can make use of user-defined values in your project skeletons which are make available below the .Values variable in templates. The values can have whatever type or structure you like. You can even nest them.

It is good practice to set sane defaults for values you are using in your skeleton so that users do not run into problems or weird behaviour that comes along with undefined variables.

Users can override these values upon project creation using the --set or --values CLI flags.

For example, the following configuration sets the default for the template variable .Values.myVar to myValue:

values:
  myVar: 'myValue'

Users can then override it via --set myVar=someOtherValue or override multiple values from file via --values.

Next steps

• Templating: Learn more about .skel templates and the usage of template variables within file and directory names.
• Skeleton composition: Creating projects from multiple project skeletons.