// the find
ChristianLempa/boilerplates
Create reusable templates and turn them into configurable workloads for homelabs and self-hosted infrastructure. Free and Open-Source.
A Python CLI for generating infrastructure config files from parameterized templates — think cookiecutter but aimed at homelabbers running Docker Compose, Ansible, Terraform, and Kubernetes. You point it at a git-backed template library, answer a wizard, and get ready-to-run config files dropped into a directory. The 100+ templates in the companion library cover the usual self-hosted suspects: Traefik, Authentik, Nextcloud, Gitea, etc.
The custom Jinja2-like delimiters (`<< >>` instead of `{{ }}`) sidestep the collision problem that bites you immediately when templating YAML that already uses braces — a practical decision. Git-backed libraries with bidirectional sync mean your templates are versioned and sharable without any central registry. The `--no-interactive` flag with explicit `--var` overrides makes it scriptable, which is the only way templating tools stay useful past initial setup. NixOS flake support is a nice touch that most tools in this space ignore entirely.
The 0.2.0 breaking change that dropped `.j2` extension support and `template.yaml` manifests in favor of `template.json` is recent and undocumented beyond a warning in the README — anyone who built custom templates against the old format has to migrate with no tooling help. Language-specific validation (Python syntax, shell linting) is explicitly punted to 'follow-up work', so bad templates fail silently at runtime rather than at validate time. There are `.j2.final`, `.j2.backup`, and `.yaml.backup` files committed directly to the library (`komodo`, `postgres`, `uptimekuma`), which suggests the library is being edited by hand without much discipline. The tool is fundamentally single-machine local generation; there's no concept of environments, state, or idempotency — you're still manually tracking what you deployed where.