From the start, creating a new weboob module was a pain, as you had a lot of repetitive copy-paste-alter tasks to do.
Since I can’t stand anything repetitive, I created a tool to speed up module creation, which was inspired from the now retired tools/gen_comic_reader.sh.

Now, when I see code generation, I usually think something must be wrong. In our case, what we are really doing is filling automatically some fields like author, class name, etc. A lot of web frameworks also do that kind of base code generation with success.

It’s a very simple tool, which provides “recipes”, those recipes being a set of templates. Though you can override them, it tries to guess as much details as possible, like your name and e-mail.

Here is an example session:

$ ./tools/boilerplate.py
usage: boilerplate.py [-h] [-a AUTHOR] [-e EMAIL] {base,comic,comic.test} ...
boilerplate.py: error: too few arguments
 
$ ./tools/boilerplate.py base "foo bar"
Created modules/foobar/__init__.py
Created modules/foobar/backend.py
Created modules/foobar/browser.py
Created modules/foobar/pages.py

The backend.py should look like:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 
# Copyright(C) 2013      Laurent Bachelier
#
# [...]
 
from weboob.tools.backend import BaseBackend
 
from .browser import FooBarBrowser
 
 
__all__ = ['FooBarBackend']
 
 
class FooBarBackend(BaseBackend):
    NAME = 'foobar'
    DESCRIPTION = u'foobar website'
    MAINTAINER = u'Laurent Bachelier'
    EMAIL = 'laurent@bachelier.name'
    VERSION = '0.f'
 
    BROWSER = FooBarBrowser

You can jump into the code right now!

As of now, there is only a minimal “base” recipe and the two “comic” recipes taken from the previous tool; however as boilerplate.py is intended to be highly extensible and maintainable, I hope it will support more specialized recipes soon (for example, “newspaper” or “pastebin”). You know what to do.

I am now working for Budget Insight.

My work should be mostly Python, and for some part contributions to the weboob project.

Even though I’m not looking at all in that branch, I still get at least an e-mail a week for symfony-related work! I guess this is good for Symfony developers, though.