nqthqn / elm-codegen

Elm CodeGen

Elm CodeGen is an Elm package and CLI tool for generating Elm code.

• Here we are on NPM
• And the code docs on the Elm package website

The goal is to be easier to write and more maintainable than that string template you have lying around. 😏

Here's what this tool does for you in order to make generating code simpler.

1. Automatic imports — Import declarations are calculated.
2. Built in type inference — The types for your generated code are inferred, which means generated things can figure out their own type signatures.
3. Use existing packages easily — For generating code that uses a specific library such as elm-ui, the elm-codegen CLI can create some Elm code to help you out. Check out the Using packages guide to get a better idea of what this looks like!

To get started, here's a small example to give you an idea of what the code looks like!

Elm.declaration "anExample"
    (Elm.record
        [ ("name", Elm.string "a fancy string!")
        , ("fancy", Elm.bool True)
        ]
    )
    |> Elm.ToString.declaration

The above will generate the following string:

anExample : { name : String, fancy : Bool }
anExample =
    { name = "a fancy string!"
    , fancy = True
    }

Check out the guide!

• Getting started
• Writing a generator
• Using packages/helpers
• Running via TypeScript

And finally, the elm-codegen package documentation.

Using the CLI

npm install -g elm-codegen

Then you can start a codegen project using:

elm-codegen init