Usage 

Template repositories can reside on GitHub and should be named with the suffix .g8. We’re keeping a list of templates on the wiki.

To apply a template, for example, unfiltered/unfiltered.g8:

$ g8 unfiltered/unfiltered.g8

Giter8 resolves this to the unfiltered/unfiltered.g8 repository and queries GitHub for the project’s template parameters. Alternatively, you can also use a git repository full name

$ g8 https://gitlab.com/unfiltered/unfiltered-gitlab.g8.git

or even a local template, using the file:// protocol:

$ g8 file://path/to/template

For remote or local repositories it’s possible to fetch a specific branch, a specific tag or even a specific directory using command-line arguments:

-b, --branch <value>     Resolve a template within a given branch
-t, --tag <value>        Resolve a template within a given tag
-d, --directory <value>  Resolve a template within the given 
                         subdirectory in the repo

The default enclosing directory is ..

You’ll be prompted for each parameter, with its default value in square brackets:

name [My Web Project]: 

Enter your own value or press enter to accept the default. After all values have been supplied, giter8 fetches the templates, applies the parameters, and writes them to your filesystem.

If the template has a name parameter, it will be used to create base directory in the current directory (typical for a new project). Otherwise, giter8 will output its files and directories into the current directory, skipping over any files that already exist.

An output directory can be specified:

-o, --out <value>        Output directory

this will override the generation of the directory’s name according to the value of the name variable and the current directory as the enclosing one.

To overwrite existing files in the destination folder, you can use:

-f, --force              Force overwrite of any existing files in 
                         output directory

Once you become familiar with a template’s parameters, you can enter them on the command line and skip the interaction:

$ g8 unfiltered/unfiltered.g8 --name=my-new-website

Any unsupplied parameters are assigned their default values.

Private Repositories 

Giter8 will use your ssh key to access private repositories, just like git does.

SSH Agent 

Giter8 now support proxying to an SSH Agent which can be useful if you are using another SSH agent such as gpg-agent.

Consider the following example:

~/.gitconfig:

[url "ssh://git@github.com"]
    insteadOf = https://github.com

~/.profile:

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK="$(gpgconf --list-dirs agent-ssh-socket)"
gpgconf --launch gpg-agent 

Then this would have previously failed with:

$ g8 unfiltered/unfiltered.g8

ssh://git@github.com/unfiltered/unfiltered.g8.git: Auth fail

This now works provided that the GitHub public key is in your known hosts file.

You can do this by running:

$ ssh -T git@github.com

Optionally the known hosts file can be overridden using:

-h, --known-hosts <value>  SSH known hosts file. If unset the location 
                           will be guessed.