Igniter
Igniter is a code generation and project patching framework.
For library authors, this is a tool kit for writing smarter generators that can semantically modify existing files, and all sorts of useful tools for doing so.
For end-users, this means mix igniter.install <package>, which will add it to your mix.exs automatically and then run that library’s installer if it has one. Even when libraries don’t have an installer, or use igniter, this behavior makes it useful to keep around.
Installation
Igniter can be added to an existing elixir project by adding it to your dependencies:
{:igniter, "~> 0.1", only: [:dev]}
You can also generate new projects with igniter preinstalled, and run installers in the same command.
mix igniter.new app_name --install ash
To use this command, install the archive:
mix archive.install hex igniter_new
Patterns
Mix tasks built with igniter are both individually callable, and composable. This means that tasks can call eachother, and also end users can create and customize their own generators composing existing tasks.
Installers
Igniter will look for a task called <your_package>.install when the user runs mix igniter.install <your_package>, and will run it after installing and fetching dependencies.
Generators/Patchers
These can be run like any other mix task, or composed together. For example, lets say that you wanted to have your own Ash.Resource generator, that starts with the default mix ash.gen.resource task, but then adds or modifies files:
# in lib/mix/tasks/my_app.gen.resource.ex
defmodule Mix.Tasks.MyApp.Gen.Resource do
use Igniter.Mix.Task
def igniter(igniter, [resource | _] = argv) do
resource = Igniter.Code.Module.parse(resource)
my_special_thing = Module.concat([resource, SpecialThing])
location = Igniter.Code.Module.proper_location(my_special_thing)
igniter
|> Igniter.compose_task("ash.gen.resource", argv)
|> Igniter.create_new_elixir_file(location, """
defmodule #{inspect(my_special_thing)} do
# this is the special thing for #{inspect()}
end
""")
end
end
Kudos to 
you’re trying to create an archive that depends on igniter? hex archives can’t have dependencies, unfortunately, so yes igniter would need to be a dependency of the target application.
). So maybe you can just detect that they don’t have igniter as a dep of their project and tell them that they need to add it if they don’t have it? They can even remove it when theyre done if they want.
