polyinit

An interactive project generator for the terminal. One command, six languages, sensible defaults.

pip install polyinit
polyinit create

Why

Language-native scaffolders are excellent at their own language and useless at the other five. cargo new cannot make you a Go service, and npm create cannot make you a Rust library. polyinit gives you a single interactive flow that spans every language you are likely to touch, with the same questions and the same layout each time.

Usage

polyinit create

Walks you through name, language, project type and features, shows a summary to confirm, then generates the project.

polyinit create                # ask for everything
polyinit create my-project     # skip the name prompt

The project type list is derived from the templates that actually ship, so every combination you can pick is one that will generate.

polyinit run

Runs the project in the current directory. It detects the language from the files present and picks the real entry point, rather than guessing.

polyinit run              # detect language, ask for runner
polyinit run python uv    # explicit language and runner

$ polyinit run
Running: python -m my_app.main
Hello world from my-app!

For a library, which has no entry point, it says so and points you at the tests instead of failing with a stack trace.

polyinit templates

Lists every language and project type that ships with the installed version.

polyinit doctor

Checks your toolchain and verifies the installation. Useful when a template needs something you have not installed.

polyinit version

Prints the installed version.

Templates

Python projects can optionally include a virtual environment, pytest and ruff. Selecting a feature that was skipped removes the matching config from pyproject.toml too, so you never get a [tool.pytest.ini_options] section pointing at a tests/ directory that is not there.

Adding a template

Templates live in src/polyinit/templates/<language>/<project-type>/ and are plain project directories. Drop one in and it appears in the prompts on the next run, with no code change.

Files and directory names can use two placeholders:

{{package_name}} is also substituted in directory names, so src/{{package_name}}/ becomes src/my_app/.

Templates ship with every feature enabled and are valid projects on their own. Opting out of a feature removes it after rendering, which keeps templates usable by hand without running polyinit.

Development

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

pytest        # unit tests
ruff check .

To build every shipped template and confirm the set is coherent:

python -m tests.check_templates

This writes each template to generated/ so you can build or run it with the real toolchain. CI does this across Python, Node, Rust and Go.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.