How many time have you found yourself experimenting with different packages and libraries for your projects and have to setup a new project from scratch every time?. Scaffolding projects can be a time consuming task and should be automated. Unfortunately, there are not many tools available that provide a good & easy to use developer experience.

That’s where Jumpstart comes in. Jumpstart is a VS Code extension that helps you to scaffold your projects with just a few clicks. It comes with a collection of templates for different languages and frameworks, you can even create your own templates and share them with the community.

Installation

You can install Jumpstart from the VS Code marketplace. Once installed, you can access it from the command palette by typing Jumpstart.

Usage

Once you install the VS Code extension, you can access it from the command palette by searching for Jumpstart.

Choose the Jumpstart Home option to open the Jumpstart home page.

Creating a scaffolded project is as easy as 1-2-3 with Jumpstart, just enter the name of your project, select the template and click on the Generate Project button.

For now we offer 3 templates, we are actively adding support for more templates across different languages and frameworks. The current templates are:

1. Rust
2. Golang
3. Golang + Gin (Go project with Gin framework)

The extension will ask you to select the location where you want to generate the project. Once you select the location, the project will be generated & pushed to your GitHub as a private repository within a few seconds.

Let’s take a look at the contents of the generated project. For demonstration purposes, we will be using the Golang Gin template.

As you can see, the generated project is already initialised as a git repo containing a Makefile with commands to build the project. The project also contains a minimal Dockerfile file to build and run the project in a container.

Contribute to Jumpstart

Jumpstart is an open source project, built using Go.

You can also contribute to the Jumpstart by creating new templates or improving the existing ones. You can find the source code for Jumpstart templates on GitHub

Conclusion

Jumpstart is a great tool for scaffolding your projects. It is easy to use and it comes with a lot of templates for different languages and frameworks. It also allows you to create your own templates and share them with the community.