Project Reference File

Synopsis

When iterating on a project, it can be tiring to have to manually set the meta information each time.

With the Project Reference File, you can place a file in your working folder for your project template and have it automatically detect settings.

Description

The File

The file must be named PSMDTemplate.ps1 and must be located in the root folder / reference path.

The content

The file must be a powershell script without syntax errors that returns a hashtable.

Example content:

@{
    TemplateName = 'PSFProject'
    Version = "1.0.0"
    AutoIncrementVersion = $true
    Tags = 'module','psframework'
    Author = 'Friedrich Weinmann'
    Description = 'PowerShell Framework based project scaffold'
    Exclusions = @("PSMDInvoke.ps1") # Contains list of files - relative path to root - to ignore when building the template
    Scripts = @{
        guid = {
            [System.Guid]::NewGuid().ToString()
        }
        date = {
            Get-Date -Format "yyyy-MM-dd"
        }
        year = {
            Get-Date -Format "yyyy"
        }
        guid2 = {
            [System.Guid]::NewGuid().ToString().ToUpper()
        }
        guid3 = {
            [System.Guid]::NewGuid().ToString().ToUpper()
        }
        guid4 = {
            [System.Guid]::NewGuid().ToString().ToUpper()
        }
    }
}

As you can see, it has several properties of some interest:

Name	Description
TemplateName	The name of the emitted template. Replaces the need to specify -TemplateName when calling New-PSMDTemplate
Version	The version number to set for the template.
AutoIncrementVersion	If the template already exists, and the specified version is lower than or equal to the current template, increment the latest version by 1 for the new template
Tags	This sets the Tags property on the template. Templates can be searched by tags, there is no other implicit functionality here.
Author	The author of this template
Description	Adds a description to the template
Exclusions	List of files - relative to the root - that will be ignored when building the template.
Scripts	List of registered, named scriptblocks. Those will be executed when invoking the template, their results will be available for insertion under their name. For more details on ScriptBlocks, see The guide to working with scriptblocks

Creating a project template that contains a reference file

Once the reference file is created, simply call it like this:

New-PSMDTemplate -ReferencePath "C:\path\to\template\folder"

Since all the meta information was specified in the reference file, no further information is necessary. Note: The reference file itself is never part of the template itself.