Create a new project

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skuba can guide you through an interactive prompt to initialise a new directory and Git repository for your project. It includes a set of starter templates that reflect the typical components of a core SEEK service.

If you are looking to bootstrap an existing project, see skuba configure.

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skuba init

Creates a new local project from a starter template.

skuba init does not provision any resources in AWS, Buildkite or GitHub on its own, and only requires a connection to the public npm registry. Most of its built-in templates start you off with a Buildkite pipeline that should be ready to go once you push your repository to GitHub and configure Buildkite.

Option	Description
--debug	Enable debug console output

Interactive walkthrough

Let’s start by running the command:

skuba init

and answering a few starter questions:

? For starters, some project details:
⊙          Owner : SEEK-Jobs/my-team
⊙           Repo : my-repo
⊙       Platform : arm64
⊙ Default Branch : main

# ...

skuba init will initialise your CODEOWNERS file and a few others based on the specified owner. GitHub teams can be found at the following URL:

github.com/orgs/SEEK-Jobs/teams/my-team/repositories

You’re now presented with a selection of templates:

? Select a template:
  express-rest-api
❯ greeter
  koa-rest-api
  lambda-sqs-worker
  lambda-sqs-worker-cdk
  oss-npm-package
  private-npm-package
  github →

Use the ↑ ↓ arrow keys, then ⏎ enter your selection.

The selected template will prompt you to fill out some additional fields. You can skip these for now to get your bearing:

This template uses the following information:

- Prod Buildkite queue

? Fill this in now? …
  yes
❯ no

Resume this later with pnpm exec skuba configure.

skuba init will take a while to install some initial dependencies, after which you’ll have a new directory to work with:

Initialized empty Git repository in /my-repo/.git/
Installing dependencies...

✔ All done! Try running:

cd my-repo
git push --set-upstream origin main

You can now proceed to the next steps.

Unattended execution

skuba init is interactive by default. For unattended execution, pipe in JSON:

skuba init << EOF
{
  "destinationDir": "tmp-greeter",
  "templateComplete": true,
  "templateData": {
    "ownerName": "my-org/my-team",
    "prodBuildkiteQueueName": "123456789012:cicd",
    "platformName": "arm64",
    "repoName": "tmp-greeter"
  },
  "templateName": "greeter"
}
EOF

–

Next steps

Now that you’ve run skuba init, where does that leave you?

Git repository

Let’s review the Git repository that has been initialised to see what’s in there:

git log
# Clone greeter
# Initial commit

git remote get-url origin
# git@github.com:<org>/<repo>.git

skuba has committed its initial template files and configured a remote origin for you. You should create the corresponding repository on GitHub and push to it. Replace main with your default branch name as appropriate:

git push --set-upstream origin main

Directory structure

Familiarise yourself with the directory structure that skuba has created:

├── .buildkite
├── .github
├── .vscode
└── src
    ├── app.test.ts
    ├── app.ts
├── .dockerignore
├── .gitignore
├── .nvmrc
├── .prettierignore
├── .prettierrc.js
├── Dockerfile
├── eslint.config.js
├── README.md
├── docker-compose.yml
├── jest.config.js
├── jest.setup.ts
├── package.json
├── pnpm-lock.yaml
├── skuba.template.js
├── tsconfig.build.json
├── tsconfig.json

A few points to call out:

• There are configuration files aplenty for the various tools we use in skuba and more broadly at SEEK.
• The .buildkite directory houses a CI/CD pipeline that should be ready to go once you push your repository to GitHub and configure Buildkite.
• The src directory contains our source code, which is later compiled to lib.
• package.json lists your project dependencies and scripts.

CLI commands

Try out some of the commands documented throughout this CLI section.

skuba lint may be a good starting point:

skuba lint

Templating

If you skipped templating earlier, skuba lint will complain that you haven’t finished it.

Once you’re ready, run skuba configure:

skuba configure

You can grep your directory for the values you enter to figure out where they are used, and you can always change them later.

README checklist

Each built-in template has a README.md that contains a checklist of next steps to take your project to production.