AndyL
Interesting discussion in the may office hours!
Questions about igniter:
- it sounds like igniter works with a tree of code-elements that perform generation. what do you call the bit of code that implements an ‘generator operation’? an agent? a performer? an action? (ansible calls them ‘modules’)
- is the sequencing and structure of the “igniter tree” defined within the ‘modules’ (functional composition), or by a playbook type of recipe comparable to how ansible does it?
- how is idempotency handled?
- could igniter emit data that describes the application structure (someone said something about a diff…)
- can someone post the URL of the igniter repo, to let outsiders study the pre-release code?
If it’s premature for questions like these, no problemo I’m happy to wait. Just thought I’d post these questions while they are fresh in my mind. ![]()
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zachdaniel
So there are two levels of granularity that are relevant here. There is a “task”, which is an abstraction over a mix task with one minor change, which is that you only define an
igniter/2function, which takes an igniter (a small wrapper around aRewrite) and returns an igniter. This enables chaining. For example, here is a very early version ofmix igniter.install.ash.resourceThat level of granularity would be called a
task, and tasks can be composed withIgniter.compose_task/2. This means any task can be called viamixor composed, which is a very useful property.At a lower level of granularity, you have individual functions that will modify a
rewriteto make some code modification. We don’t currently have a name for these aside from “functions”, but you could perhaps call them “codemods”. Here is an example snippet frommix igniter.install.ashadd_dependency,import_depandconfigureare examples of the building blocks Igniter will provide.As you can see above, it is functional composition. A playbook/DSL version may come some day, but is not necessary to start.
When you run an igniter task, it displays a diff of all changes. Here is example output from running
mix igniter.install ashin a new package (ignore the bit about the local dependency. You have to use a local dependency to test/work on your igniterSince those are all new files, I need to figure out a way to hide the left side of those line numbers representing the original files, just haven’t done that yet
The codebase is not quite ready, but I will share it before too long.
zachdaniel
In the spirit of building in the open, the source code has been made public: GitHub - ash-project/igniter: A code generation and project patching framework. · GitHub There isn’t much to it yet, but more will come, and a
0.1release should happen in the next few weeks ideally.TwistingTwists
Waiting!