st-creator 0.2.0

A stupid CLI to easily create themes for Structurizr.

Structurizr Theme Creator

A very stupid CLI to create Structurizr themes starting from icons.

:warning: This is super work in progress. Will be completed soon.

Installation

st is not published to PyPI yet, so you can install it directly from the repository using uv.

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/FedericoCantarelli/st.git
cd st

# Install dependencies and create the virtual environment
uv sync

# Run the CLI using uv
uv run st --help

If you want to have st command available directly from CLI, you can install the tool running the following command from the root of the repository:

uv tool install .
st --help

Usage

The CLI is enterile based on click module. To get CLI help you can run the following command:

st --help

Version

Print the CLI version

st version

Clean

Normalizes a raw icon export (e.g. downloaded from an icon library) into a directory of cleaned_string-named files and directories, ready to be fed into st theme create. See Naming Convention for how output names are derived. Hidden files and directories (starting with .) are skipped.

st theme clean <path> [--output <dir>] [--rules <rules.st>]

Argument / Option	Required	Description
path	Yes	Path to the input directory containing the raw icon export. Must exist.
--output	No	Name of the output directory, created as a sibling of path. Defaults to cleaned.
--rules	No	Path to a rules file used to filter which icons are processed.

Example:

st theme clean ./raw-icons --output cleaned --rules ./rules.st

Create

Create a theme from a cleaned icon directory, builds one theme element per .svg file found, and exports a theme.json compatible with Structurizr's custom theme format. The output is written to a new directory named after --name (lowercased, spaces replaced with -), placed as a sibling of path.

st theme create <path> --name "My Theme" [--description <text>] [--rules <rules.st>]

Argument / Option	Required	Description
path	Yes	Path to the input directory containing the icons to include in the theme. Must exist.
--name	Yes	Name of the theme. Also used to derive the file prefix and tag prefix (see Naming Convention).
--description	No	Description of the theme, written into theme.json.
--rules	No	Path to a rules file used to filter which icons are processed.

Example:

st theme create ./cleaned --name "GCP Icons" --description "Google Cloud Platform icon theme" --rules ./rules.st

On first run, st theme create creates a default configuration file at ~/.st/config.ini if one does not already exist. For the moment this file is unusued. TODO: implement default configuration options in this file.

Naming Convention of Exported Icons

The naming convention of exported icons depends on the directory structure of the icons: exported icon names depend on the first-level nested directories inside the input directory.

Given the following project structure:

# First level nested directories are `Category Icons` and `Unique Icons`
.
├── Category Icons
│   └── Agents
│       ├── PNG
│       │   └── Agents-512-color.png
│       └── SVG
│           └── Agents-512-color.svg
└── Unique Icons
    └── AlloyDB
        ├── PNG
        │   └── AlloyDB-512-color.png
        └── SVG
            └── AlloyDB-512-color.svg

The naming convention for the exported icons is the following:

<prefix>_<first_level_dir>_<snake_case_filename>

where <prefix> is computed from theme name, <first_level_dir> is the name of the first-level nested directory in snake case, and <snake_case_filename> is the filename converted to snake case, removing everything else that is not a character (number or non-alphanumeric characters).

For example the file AlloyDB-512-color.png will be exported as gcp_unique_icons_alloydb_color.png if the theme name is Google Cloud Platform.

Only the top-level directory (one level inside the --path folder) is used for the naming convention.

For st theme create, the --name you pass also drives two additional prefixes:

• Tag prefix: used to prefix the Structurizr element tag (e.g. GCP - Category - Agents). If the theme name has more than two "eligible" words (longer than 2 characters), the prefix is the initials of those words; otherwise it's the whole name in snake case.
• File prefix: same derivation logic, used to prefix the icon file name and the theme's output directory.

Rules DSL

Both st theme clean and st theme create accept an optional --rules <path> argument pointing to a rules file (conventionally named rules.st). Rules let you filter which icons get processed without having to restructure your input directory. TODO: eventually this can become a .txt for the mental health of everybody.

A rules file is a sequence of INCLUDE(<expr>) / EXCLUDE(<expr>) statements, one or more per file. <expr> is a boolean expression built from AND, OR, NOT, parentheses, and two kinds of leaf predicates:

• ATTRIBUTE=value — glob-matches value against an icon attribute. Supports * (any sequence of characters, including none), ? (any single character), and [...] / [!...] character classes (with - for ranges, e.g. [a-z]).
• CONTAIN(ATTRIBUTE, "substring") — true if the attribute's value contains substring as a literal substring.

ATTRIBUTE is one of:

Attribute	Description
NAME	The icon's file name without its extension.
EXTENSION	The icon's file extension, including the leading dot (e.g. .svg).
PATH	The icon's full path, as a POSIX-style string.

Matching is case-sensitive. Values are written either as bare words or quoted strings ('...' or "..."); quoting is required for values containing spaces or reserved characters. This set of attributes is meant to be extensible and will be expanded (hopefully) in future versions of the CLI to allow more specific rules.

Decision rule

An icon is dropped if it matches any EXCLUDE expression, unless it also matches an INCLUDE expression. Thus INCLUDE always overrides EXCLUDE on conflict. Default is keep: if an icon matches neither an INCLUDE nor an EXCLUDE expression is kept.

If a rules file has INCLUDE statements but no EXCLUDE statements, INCLUDE acts as a standalone whitelist: only icons matching at least one INCLUDE expression are kept

• 'INCLUDE' acts as a filter in
• 'EXCLUDE' acts as a filter out Thus 'EXCLUDE(NOT NAME="file_name.svg") will include the file_name.svg and exclude all the others.

I'm not sure if this is the best approach, but i wrote it like this.

Examples

Keep only .svg files, and drop anything under a directory called Unique Icons, unless its file name starts with Alloy:

INCLUDE(NAME="Alloy*" AND EXTENSION=".svg")
EXCLUDE(CONTAIN(PATH, "Unique Icons"))
EXCLUDE(NOT EXTENSION=".svg")

Whitelist a single file, dropping everything else:

INCLUDE(NAME="filename")
EXCLUDE(NAME="*")

Exclude every file whose name contains 'deprecated'

EXCLUDE(CONTAIN(NAME, "deprecated"))