Developer Tools

Introduction

Cement ships with a CLI utility that includes tools and helpers for application developement. It is in-itself an application Built on Cement™, and can serve as a working example of some of the key features of the framework.

Install additional dependencies:

$ pip install cement[cli]

See:

$ cement --help

The Cement CLI uses the builtin Generate Extension in order to easily create new projects, extensions, plugins, or scripts.

See:

$ cement generate --help

Creating Your First Project Built on Cement™

Using the Cement Developer Tools CLI, you can quickly generate a new project:

Note: Press <ENTER> in order to take the default values for myapp:

$ cement generate project ./myapp
INFO: Generating cement project in ./myapp
App Label [myapp]:
App Name [My Application]:
App Class Name [MyApp]:
App Description [MyApp Does Amazing Things!]:
Creator Name [John Doe]:
Creator Email [[email protected]]:
Project URL [https://github.com/johndoe/myapp/]:
License [unlicensed]:

We have just generated a new project in the directory ./myapp. The included README.md includes general information that is built-in to your new project out-of-the box including how to setup a development environment, run tests, push packages to PyPi, and deploy via Docker.

Customizing Templates

The Generate Extension reads templates from any template directory paths, therefore adding your own templates to Cement is as simple as adding a template directory to Cement's configuration file, cloning a builtin template, and then generating from your own templates using the same utility.

Add the following to ~/.cement.yml:

cement:
    template_dir: ~/templates

Then clone an existing template:

$ cement generate project \
    --clone ~/templates/generate/my-template

Your template is now part of Cement! Customize it to your liking, and use it in the same way as the builtin templates:

$ cement generate --help
usage: cement generate [-h]
                       {project,script,plugin,extension,my-template}
                       ...

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

sub-commands:
  {project,script,plugin,extension,my-template}
    project             generate project from template
    script              generate script from template
    plugin              generate plugin from template
    extension           generate extension from template
    my-template         generate my-template from template