The problem: Any time I wanted to create a new Node.js project, I found myself having to dig through old projects to copy over a bunch of configuration files, like .prettierrc and .eslintrc and repeatedly installing the same eslint plugins from npm. It took a bit of time and effort to get my initial project up and running, since I wanted everything to be just right. Often, by the time I had the project scaffolding setup, I had lost whatever motivation I had to start working on some new side project. Surely, there must be an easier way.

There is!

The solution (for my purposes, at least): This is a project I created to quickly setup a new dev environment for Node.js projects using configuration settings that I've frequently used in my previous work. This script greatly simplifies the process of getting a basic project template up and running, with optional support for tests, TypeScript and setting up an API using Express. This also provided a good reason to experiment with creating command line applications in Node.js.

On my M1 Macbook Air, I can get a new project up and running in ~30 seconds. 🙌

1. Clone this project to your local machine: git clone git@github.com:daveschumaker/bootstrap-node-project.git
2. > cd ./bootstrap-node-project
3. > npm install
4. > npm run config:setup to create an empty config.js file that can be used to set default name and email address for new projects. Adding defaults to this file is optional.
5. Install as a global command line app: npm run install:global
6. Invoke bootstrap-node anywhere on your system to get started.

This script installs the following into a new project:

• eslint / prettier / [various eslint plugins] - handles code formatting and linting in a new project.
• husky - Enable precommit hooks for enforcing linting and code styling
• tap - Uses Node TAP (Test Anything Protocol) for quick and easy testing and creates a basic test
• express (optional) - Quickly setup API endpoints and routes using Express
• typescript 🙌 (optional) - Can optionally setup projects with TypeScript. (Current default is true)
• nodemon (optional) - Can optionally setup projects with nodemon. (Current default is false)

After a new project is bootstrapped, the directory structure looks like this:

my-cool-project/
├─ .husky/
├─ node_modules/
├─ src/
│  ├─ index.js (ts)
│  ├─ index.test.js (ts)
├─ .eslintrc.json
├─ .gitignore
├─ .prettierrc
├─ package-lock.json
├─ package.json
├─ README.md
├─ tsconfig.json (optional)

An ongoing issue that I haven't been able to figure out is that a new project seems to be created with elevated permissions, meaning that you cannot delete the folder as your current user. For example, if you've bootstrapped a new project into the folder ./my-cool-project, you might see this when trying to remove it.

> rm -rf my-cool-project
rm: my-cool-project: Permission denied

The solution seems to be either to elevate yourself to root and run sudo rm -rf my-cool-project or to add a dot-slash to indicate the relative path: rm -rf ./my-cool-project seems to work as well.

• Add more configuration options:
• Choose license type
• Private or public package
• Option to choose npm or yarn.