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diecut

A single-binary project template generator
Terminal window
curl -fsSL https://diecut.dev/install.sh | sh

More install options →

Terminal window
diecut new gh:raiderrobert/diecut-templates/rust-cli -o my-cli

That’s it. diecut prompts you for variables and generates a ready-to-go project.

Learn more about using templates →

I built diecut because I tend to make lots of projects for fun. I get a stack I like, and I don’t like messing around with the setup. I enjoyed cookiecutter back in the day, but I found it complicating my life more than simplifying it.

I aimed to solve four things:

  • Single binary: I’ve often just wanted to download a binary and no faff with Python stuff, even though I wrote mostly Python.
  • Easy to make: I wanted it to be dead simple to make templates with as few footguns as possible. So you also don’t need to do complicated logic in the templates, because you can just chain conditional prompts together to get your answers. You don’t even need to use almost any of the Tera templating at all and can just use conditional files feature to exclude files you don’t want.
  • Multi-template repos: I dabble a lot in different stacks and languages, but I’d rather not have 5 different repos for my templates. This felt like a good way to organize them.
  • Safe to try: sometimes I want to see what the result will look like before I commit to it, but none of the other tools out there had this feature.