Creating new T5 projects the easy way

The Maven archetype for Tapestry projects is really useful for getting up and running quickly.

However, that's not what I use day-to-day. That command line is so long and ugly!

I use the following Ruby script as a wrapper around Maven:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'optparse'

$group = nil
$artifact = nil
$package = nil
$archetypeVersion = nil
$version = "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"
$offline = false

$opts = OptionParser.new do |opts|
  
  opts.banner = "Usage: new-project.rb [options]"
  
  opts.on("-g", "--group GROUP", "The group id for the new project") do |value|
    $group = value
  end

  opts.on("-a", "--artifact ARTIFACT", "The artifact for the new project") do |value|
    $artifact = value
  end
  
  opts.on("-p", "--package PACKAGE", "The root package for source code in the new project") do |value|
    $package = value
  end
  
  opts.on("-v", "--version VERSION", "The version number of the new project") do |value|
    $version = value
  end
  
  opts.on("-o", "--offline", "Execute Maven in offline mode") { $offline = true }
  
  opts.on("-V", "--archetype-version VERSION", "Version of the Tapestry quickstart archetype") do |value|
    $archetypeVersion = value
  end
  
  opts.on("-h", "--help", "Help for this command") do
    puts opts
    exit
  end
end

def fail(message)
  puts "Error: #{message}"
  puts $opts
  exit
end


begin
  $opts.parse!
rescue OptionParser::InvalidOption
  fail $!
end

fail "Unexpected command line argument" if ARGV.length > 0
fail "Must specify group" unless $group
fail "Must specify artifact" unless $artifact

$package = $package || "#$group.#$artifact"

command = ["mvn"]

command << "-o" if $offline

command << [
  "archetype:create",
  "-DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.tapestry",
  "-DarchetypeArtifactId=quickstart",
  "-DgroupId=#$group",
  "-DartifactId=#$artifact",
  "-DartifactVersion=#$version",
  "-DpackageName=#$package"]

if $archetypeVersion
  command << "-DarchetypeVersion=#$archetypeVersion"
end

command = command.join ' '

exec command

A typical usage is thus: new-project -g com.example -a myapp ... and we're off and running.