Automatic project structure/git creation in Windows

While working in projects on a daily basis, as I do for YouTube videos, we tend to create the same folder structure and related repositories every time, as we move to the next project.  For me, it is like creating folders for video, code, uploaded video, schematics and so on and in my most of the video for YouTube, I always create almost same folders. Along with that, I create GitHub repository to host the codes that I use in the project or tutorial to distribute. And I hate doing the same thing over and over, so I thought of making it automatic somehow, starting from folder creation to the remote git repo. As my primary machine is a Windows 10 one, I went with bash scripting. You can do that with any programming language like C++ or Java, but I wanted a simple one with not much development time. So this post is all about that.

First of all creating folders and navigating is pretty easy. It involves commands like mkdir and cd only. The script when run asks for the name of the project, and it takes that as the primary folder name, and after that, it creates subfolders under it.

@echo off
set /p project="Enter ID: "
echo Project name is %project%

cd C://Workspace
mkdir "%project%"
cd "%project%"
mkdir Blog Code Edits Raw Thumbnails Upload
mkdir Code\Lib Code\Circuit Code\Docs Raw\Images Raw\Videos Raw\Unused Raw\B_Rolls Raw\Screen_Capture
cd Code

I just want to add code folder to my git repository, not all the folders. So inside the code folder a README.md file is first created with a line of text with the name of the project and start date. After that, it initializes an empty git repository and does a commit with the README file added.

echo Started working on project on %DATE:~10,4%%DATE:~4,2%%DATE:~7,2% %project% > README.md
git init
git add .
git commit -m "Starting the project on %DATE:~10,4%%DATE:~4,2%%DATE:~7,2%"

** For above script to execute I assume you have git installed in your system. If not you can download from here.

After that, it justs a matter of grating a remote repository in any of the cloud git services that you are using. I am using GitHub, and that’s pretty easy with the provided API by Github. If you are using any other service like BitBucket or Gitlab, you can explore their APIs. In windows to call API from the bash script, we need to install curl, as it does not as default like in Linux. To install curl support download from here and just install it.

After curl is installed, we need to get an access token from here. To obtain the token, you needed to be logged in and joined the developer program. To do so click on the Generate new token button as shown in the screenshot.

In the next screen put a description and check the required scopes that you want to use it for. For this project check the repo tick and leave others. If you’re going to explore other scopes, you can certainly do so. Click on the Generate button and copy the token in the next screen.

***Please don’t try to use the above-shown token; I have already removed it.

Now after getting the token, we can invoke the GitHub API. And the endpoint is https://api.github.com/user/repos. With curl, it looks like,

C:\Program^ Files\Portable^ Installations\curl\bin\curl.exe  -i -H "Authorization: token _Your_Token_" -d "{\"name\": \"%project%\", \"private\": true }" https://api.github.com/user/repos
set url_gh=%project: =-%
git remote add origin https://github.com/oksbwn/%url_gh%
git push -u origin master

Bikash Narayan Panda

Developer, Tinkere, a proud Dad.. love to spend my available time playing with Tech!!