Tutorial Intro

Let's discover Magus in less than 5 minutes.

Getting Started

Get started by creating a new manifest.

What you'll need

• Magus CLI, install it downloading the latest release from here or using go install github.com/ismtabo/magus@latest.

Create a new manifest 📜

To create a new manifest create a YAML file with the following content:

version: "1"
name: hello-world
root: .
casts:
  hello-world:
    to: ./hello-world.md
    from: |
      # Hello World
      This is my first cast!

This manifest represents a magic, a set of casts that will generate a source file from the template you define.

Each cast have a to and a from field. The to field is the path where the cast will generate the source file. The from field is the template that will be used to generate the source file.

In addition, cast may be conditionally rendered or generated for a bunch of items from a collection. We will see this later.

Spell your casts 🧙

Now that you have a manifest, you can spell your casts.

magus generate hello-world.yaml

This command will generate the source files from the casts defined in the manifest, and will print the result in the standard output.

<!-- file: hello-world.md -->
# Hello World

This is my first cast!

See the Casts section in the docs for more information.

Using variables

You can use variables in your casts. Variables are defined in the manifest and can be used in the casts. These variables are contained in the variables field of the manifest and at each cast.

version: "1"
name: hello-world
root: .
variables:
  - name: "name"
    value: "World"
casts:
  hello-world:
    to: ./hello-world.md
    from: |
      # Hello {{ .name }}
      {{ .description }}
    variables:
      - name: "description"
        value: "This is my first cast!"

If you run again the generate command, you will see that the name variable is used in the cast.

magus generate hello-world.yaml

<!-- file: hello-world.md -->
# Hello World
This is my first cast!

By default, Magus will use the variables defined in the manifest. However, you can override these variables by passing them as flags to the generate command.

magus generate hello-world.yaml --var name=Magus

<!-- file: hello-world.md -->
# Hello Magus
This is my first cast!

Caveat: flag variables will be considered as strings. If you need to use a different type, you can use the --var-file flag to pass a YAML or a JSON file with the variables.

magus generate hello-world.yaml --var-file variables.yaml --var-file variables.json

# file: variables.yaml
name: Magus
number: 100
boolean: true

// file: variables.json
{
  "name": "Magus",
  "number": 100,
  "boolean": true
}

See the Variables section in the docs for more information.

Validating your manifest

You can validate your manifest using the validate command.

magus validate hello-world.yaml