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Skeleton structure

A project skeleton is just a simple directory inside the skeletons directory of a skeleton repository. As a minimum, the skeleton directory needs to contain a .kickoff.yaml file which may be empty to be recognized by kickoff.

The .kickoff.yaml file can contain some metadata and additional configuration for the skeleton which we will learn more about further down the page.

  1. Simple skeletons
  2. Grouping skeletons into topics
  3. Advanced skeletons with file and directory name templating
  4. Next steps

Simple skeletons

A simple skeleton named myskeleton inside a skeleton repository at ~/kickoff-skeletons may look like this:

~/kickoff-skeletons
└── skeletons
    └── myskeleton
        ├── .kickoff.yaml
        ├── README.md.skel
        └── somefile.txt

You might have spotted the file with the .skel extension. This is a special skeleton template file that gets evaluated during project creation and can contain variables for project specific information or even user-defined values. The templating guide has more detailed information about that.

Grouping skeletons into topics

Sometimes it is a good idea to group thing together based on a specific topic to keep things organized. For example, you might want to group project skeletons by programming language, business unit or concept.

Kickoff repositories support nesting directories below the skeletons dir.

~/kickoff-skeletons
└── skeletons
    └── topic
        ├── myskeleton
        │   └── .kickoff.yaml
        └── otherskeleton
            └── .kickoff.yaml

The example above shows a repository that contains two skeletons named topic/myskeleton and topic/otherskeleton. Please note that the topic directory must not contain a .kickoff.yaml file itself as nesting skeletons is not supported.

Advanced skeletons with file and directory name templating

Sometimes, file templates are just not flexible enough and we also want to dynamically name certain project files or directories based on some project specific or user-defined values.

This can be achieved by templating the filenames itself:

.~/kickoff-skeletons
└── skeletons
    └── someskeleton
        ├── .kickoff.yaml
        ├── README.md.skel
        ├── somedir
        │   └── {{.Values.somedirname}}
        │       ├── someotherfile.json
        │       ├── someothertemplate.txt.skel
        │       └── some-{{.Value.someval}}.json.skel
        ├── somefile.json
        ├── {{.Project.Name}}.conf
        ├── sometemplate.yaml.skel
        └── {{.Values.filename}}.txt

Here, file and directory names that contain template variables (e.g. {{.Values.someval}}) will be built upon project creation. The full details of that are covered in the templating guide.

Next steps