Igniter generator for poncho project?

Questions / Help
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This is definitely mostly about Igniter, incidentally about Nerves and Phoenix.

Both of those projects have generators that create a mix project. The convention in Nerves is a “poncho” project, that is, not quite an umbrella. You put Phoenix as thing_ui and Nerves as thing_firmware.

The firmware project puts the UI project as a path dependency. You copy and modify a ton of Phoenix config over the the firmware project. Then you run locally or compile firmware for your device from the firmware project.

I want to make a generator that does this all for you. It seems like igniter would be very helpful for patching config and such. But I’m uncertain if the --with approach works here for igniter.new and to what extent Igniter helps for this journey. I am fundamentally generating two separate mix projects and tying them together a bit.

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@zachdaniel what is more helpful around Igniter, ask question in Ash forum or ping you? :smiley:

Cause I didn’t see a space to put this in that made sense that you’d see :slight_smile:

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We’ve got an “igniter” channel in the ash discord, but here is good too! I’ve updated my notification settings so I get pinged on igniter tagged posts going forward, thanks for the heads up :slight_smile:

So, to answer your question:

the current state of the world is that igniter.new very much expects to create a mix project at the moment. Another fundamental (current) limitation of igniter is that it expects to be run in the context of a single mix project (but you could read/add files from external to the project)

I think we could actually potentially build some kind of first class support for poncho projects into igniter.new or igniter.new_poncho even. But barring that, it would probably look something like this:

mkdir poncho
cd poncho 
mix igniter.new thing --with phx.new --install ....
mix igniter.new thing_firmware --install your,packages

Then depending on how the installer is packaged, you might just include your_installer in the list of packages being installed, or you’d add another call to something like mix nerves.create_and_copy_phoenix_app.

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My current thinking is to not make it a poncho in the end. But this still means juggling and merging between two generators :slight_smile:

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:thinking: When you say not to make it a poncho in the end what do you mean? Maybe we can hop on a call some time and talk about what you’re looking to do?

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On vacation right now but can holler when I get goong on this.

Essentially I want to generate a Nerves mix project and a Phoenix mix project and then use igniter to work out ways to merge files that exist in both (such as config, mix.exs).

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On a similar note, our poncho project uses plain text files to specify deps instead of placing them in mix.exs as we found that easier to programmatically edit but also makes it more composable (we can have different deps source files that are included or not based on env or compile flags). This works by including a short script with Code.eval_file("mess.exs") in mix.exs

Given that context, I’d love a way to be able to use igniter.install in the project, maybe with an escape hatch to call another function instead of Igniter.apply_and_fetch_dependencies ?

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Igniter has a .igniter.exs file that can be used to configure these things, or we can try to detect things like this, but it definitely won’t work out of the box. Interested in exploring the idea though :+1:

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I wonder if it would first make sense to start by creating an igniter-powered version of mix phx.new and mix nerves.new, then you could adapt those to be able to work together (possibly within a single project) or work in a poncho fashion. Although maybe that’s what you have in mind already.