An approximate port to Common Lisp of Oatmeal, a Common Lisp project generator.
The program generates new Common Lisp projects. The idea is to make it as easy as possible to generate, test, build and install a new Common Lisp program.
- Projects can be generated and built using SBCL, a free, fast and multi-platform Lisp system.
- Generated projects have selectable features as outlined in Feature Selection, below.
- Build stand-alone binaries for the current architecture with one
command (
make). - Install using
make install. - Run unit tests for current project with
make test. - Run tests and build sample project within Docker (
make docker)- Do the above in the GitHub Actions CI system (see generated
build.yml). - Smoke-test all single features and all two-feature combinations to avoid obvious conflicts, e.g. symbol collisions.
- Do the above in the GitHub Actions CI system (see generated
Pretty alpha. I'm using it, probably nobody else is. See Prior Art for some other Common Lisp project generators.
Tested only on (and SBCL (or (Mac M1) (and Docker Ubuntu)))).
- SBCL
- Make
BINDIRdefined as an environment variable, directory is created, and on yourPATH. I use$HOME/bin.LISP_HOMEalso exists as a directory and defined.
To build steelcut, check out the current repo and cd to it. Then,
$ make
# Assuming BINDIR defined and on your PATH; I use ~/bin ...:
$ make install
$ steelcut
Usage: steelcut <appname>
$
Assuming you want to call your new project myproject:
$ steelcut myproject
Project myproject created. Thanks for using steelcut!
$ cd $LISP_HOME/myproject
$
$ make
./build.sh
This is SBCL 2.2.6, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/>.
SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses. See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
To load "myproject":
Load 1 ASDF system:
myproject
; Loading "myproject"
[package myproject]
[undoing binding stack and other enclosing state... done]
[performing final GC... done]
[saving current Lisp image into myproject:
writing 1840 bytes from the read-only space at 0x300000000
writing 1840 bytes from the static space at 0x300200000
writing 0 bytes from the immobile space at 0x300300000
writing 42270720 bytes from the dynamic space at 0x7003000000
done]
$
$ make install
test -n "/Users/myusername/bin" # $BINDIR
cp myproject /Users/myusername/bin
$
$ myproject
Thanks for using myproject!
$
Some features in generated projects are optional, and the default features can be turned off. Examples:
Generate vanilla app only with no extra dependencies:
$ steelcut myapp -ci -docker -cl-oju
Generate an app which takes command line arguments and can invoke shell commands:
$ steelcut myapp +cmd +args
+ selects an option, and is optional. - deselects a (presumably default)
option.
The following features are implemented, with more planned:
A Dockerfile is generated, and the project can be built, tested and run
in Docker with the make docker command.
A GitHub Actions build file is generated, which runs make docker.
Brings in cl-oju, a simple
compatibility library providing Common Lisp equivalents of several core
Clojure functions.
Uses Paul Rodriguez's library for interacting with the shell.
Use cl-csv to
facilitate reading and writing of CSV data.
Provides argument processing via Steve Losh's Adopt.
YAML parsing and generation by Fernando Borretti's
cl-yaml.
NOTE: you must have libyaml-dev installed for this to work!
JSON parsing and generation using cl-json.
Each option provides necessary dependencies and an example of usage in the generated project.
To handle the case where the user forgets to supply the application
name, steelcut will not allow you to use a supported feature name as
the project name.
Planned additional selectable features:
:csv :time :xml
:webclient :webserver
There are several unit tests which rely on generating example projects
in temporary directories and checking properties of the resulting
files. make docker runs a test script test-all-features which
generates and tests all single and double combinations of features.
This is best run in Docker to avoid polluting your $LISP_HOME
with lots of temporary projects.
There are quite a few Common Lisp project generators out there; some look more opinionated than others, and/or have specific focus geared towards games, web applications, etc. I haven't tried any of them.
- Alexander Artemenko:
project-templates - Andrew Kravchuk:
cookiecutter-lisp-game vindarel:cl-cookieweb- Anthony Green:
make-like - Rajasegar Chandran:
cl-webapp-seed - Mikel Evins:
electron-lisp-boilerplate - Sebastian Carlos:
cl-yasboi
(Thanks to Alexander Artemenko for supplying this list.)
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2022-2025 John Jacobsen
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.