Creating Custom Project Templates for Blade CLI

Blade comes with 32+ project templates, but many times you may feel that those are too simple or don’t fit the need for your development team. You can create new custom project templates that fit your team’s workflow and have Blade use them instead.

Important: An extension JAR can only contain one template. If you have multiple templates, each must be deployed in a separate JAR.

Implementing a custom project template should mimic that of a Maven archetype. The best way to illustrate this is by visualizing a sample template’s folder structure:

• src/
  • main/resources/
    • META-INF
      • maven
        • archetype-metadata.xml
      • archetype-post-generate.groovy (optional; only invoked by Maven projects)
    • archetype-resources
      • Folder structure to be generated
• bnd.bnd
• [build.gradle|pom.xml]

You can read more about Maven archetypes and their features and capabilities here.

To create a custom project template that can be generated using Blade CLI, follow these steps:

1. Create a generic Maven archetype following the folder structure outlined above. Follow Maven’s documentation to configure the archetype project appropriately.

2. Open the template’s bnd.bnd file and ensure it sets the following configurations:

   Bundle-Description: TEMPLATE_DESCRIPTION
   Bundle-Name: TEMPLATE_NAME
   Bundle-SymbolicName: SYMBOLIC_NAME
   Bundle-Version: TEMPLATE_VERSION
   Liferay-Versions: LIFERAY_VERSION_RANGE
   -removeheaders:\
       Import-Package,\
       Private-Package,\
       Require-Capability
   

   For example, a template’s bnd.bnd could look like this:

   Bundle-Description: Creates a Sample as a module project.
   Bundle-Name: Liferay Project Templates Sample
   Bundle-SymbolicName: com.liferay.project.templates.sample
   Bundle-Version: 1.0.0
   Liferay-Versions: [7,8)
   -removeheaders:\
       Import-Package,\
       Private-Package,\
       Require-Capability
   

   The Bundle-SymbolicName of your template JAR must have the pattern *.project.templates.<name>.*. The -removeheaders definition is a packaging requirement for all project templates. For more information on Bnd versioning, visit Bnd’s official docs.

3. Generate the extension’s JAR file (e.g., gradlew build).

It’s that easy! You’ve created a custom project template. See the Installing New Extensions article to install the project template (JAR) to Blade CLI.

You can examine a working custom project template here.