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3rd Party Templates

3rd party templates are templates that can be published to your choice of package manager like npm, yarn, or pnpm. This allows other developers to use your template by installing it globally or locally. There are special considerations you need to think about that we'll cover in this guide:

Naming​

The only requirement for 3rd party templates is that their name starts with tps-. The main reason for this is to prevent naming conflicts with other packages and to ensure your template shows up when running the list command. Due to the number of folders that could be present in node_modules, Templates does not search for templates that are not prefixed with tps- in all node_modules directories. Don't worry! You can still render instances on the CLI without the tps- prefix in the template name.

Make sure your package.json name also uses this prefix! Using this prefix in your GitHub repo name is not required but is considered good practice.

Example

If you wanted to create a 3rd party template called github-pull-request-template then add the tps- prefix in the front of the name.

| - .tps/
    | - tps-github-pull-request-template/
        | - <template code...>

Make sure to have a package.json and make sure the name property is the same as your template name:

{
    "name": "tps-github-pull-request-template"
}

When rendering new instance you can use the prefixed version or non prefixed version

tps github-pull-request-template

# Prefixed version
tps tps-github-pull-request-template

Where to store them?​

We recommend that you put 3rd party templates in your global .tps directory. This is because global templates can be used anywhere in your file system. This allows you to generate instances of this template for testing or use. Remember, Templates will load templates from a .tps folder in your current working directory or any parent directories, so you won't be able to test your template if it is not in a .tps folder.

Example

If you wanted to create a 3rd party template called github-pull-request-template that will generate a GitHub pull request template file, then your folder structure would look like this:

| - ~/
    | - .tps/
        | - tps-github-pull-request-template/
            | - <template code...>

Publishing​

When you are ready to publish your template, you can publish it to your package manager of choice. This will allow other developers to install your template and use it in their projects. Templates don't require anything special when publishing templates, so follow your favorite guide or video to publish npm, yarn, or pnpm packages.

caution

We have only tested using templates globally installed with npm. Please use npm for global templates until we can verify other package managers. If you try this and it doesn't work, please drop us an issue on GitHub.

Templates installed locally with npm, yarn, and pnpm shouldn't have any issues.

Dev and Production​

At times, you may want to have both a development and production version of your template. This can be helpful for making changes locally and testing them without affecting your production version, while still being able to access the production version to ensure you are not causing any regressions.

To do this, you can prefix your global template folder with -dev in your global .tps directory. This will allow you to render this template with <template-name>-dev. Now you can install your template globally or locally and use the production version with <template-name> and the development version with <template-name>-dev.

danger

Don't change the name of the template in your package.json.

Example

If you had a 3rd party template called tps-github-pull-request-template and you want to have a dev and production version, you can change the folder name in your global .tps directory to tps-github-pull-request-template-dev.

| - ~/
    | - .tps/
        | - tps-github-pull-request-template-dev/
            | - <template code...>

Now you can install your production version from npm, yarn, or pnpm with tps-github-pull-request-template.

npm install -g tps-github-pull-request-template

Now when you want to use your dev version you can use tps-github-pull-request-template-dev:

tps github-pull-request-template-dev

and when you want to use your PROD version you can use tps-github-pull-request-template:

tps github-pull-request-template

Example​

If you want an example of a 3rd party template, you can check out the ai template for inspiration. We use Github Actions to deploy our template to npm. Just be aware that this template doesnt use any packages so it only contains a settings.js file.