Introducing Lisk Template
Lisk is an open source blockchain project. Whenever you’re working on blockchain technology, security is always a priority. And when your project is open source, you want to make it as easy as possible for your developers—whether in-house or part of the wider community—to contribute good code.
With both of these aims in mind, we’re always looking to improve our code standards. We’re pleased to introduce our community to our repository dedicated to improving and coordinating standards across the Lisk ecosystem: Lisk Template
Coordinating standards
The main aim of the Lisk Template repository is to coordinate the adoption of standards. It consists of:
A default directory and file structure.
A default package.json file, including project information, npm scripts and basic dependencies such as our ESLint configuration.
Configuration files for various tools, including those dependencies.
A skeleton test setup, ready to get going with our Mocha BDD package if desired.
Basic documentation files, including our usual preferred license.
The README.md for the project provides information on many of the standards gathered here.
The standards present here have largely been derived from the practices we’ve been following in the various projects in the Lisk ecosystem. Projects like Lisk Commander (formerly Lisky) and Lisk Elements (formerly Lisk JS) have smaller codebases, so they often play the role of testing ground for new code standards or tools we’re considering using. Once we have this experience, and decide we like such a standard, we add it to Lisk Template, and the new standard can be rolled out to the other Lisk projects as and when it’s appropriate. (There are inevitably project-specific idiosyncrasies which might mean a given standard doesn’t make sense for every project.)
We want to foster discussion about standards, and we encourage everyone who has ideas about how to improve code standards at Lisk, or tools we should be using, to open an issue on the Lisk Template repository.
Bootstrapping new projects
The other major use case for Lisk Template is bootstrapping new projects. Since the repository already includes a list of dependencies and configuration, it’s the ideal way to start a new project. We’ve included a handy script to help you initialize a new project. Full instructions can be found here, but you can create a customized project skeleton by running the following command with your GitHub username and the name of your new project:
We already used this script at Lisk HQ to create the Mocha BDD repository, and will use it to start fresh projects going forward.
Getting involved
As part of Lisk’s mission to make blockchain technology accessible to all, we want to make it as easy as possible for developers to create decentralized applications. That covers not only the platform on which those applications are built, but the tooling used in their creation.
We would love to see our community members starting new projects (Lisk-related or otherwise!) using the Lisk Template bootstrapping script. Any feedback we receive now will be invaluable when it comes to helping people create sidechains later on.
And if you’ve got ideas about how to improve Lisk’s standards, please open an issue or get involved in the discussions on the Lisk Template repository.
Happy bootstrapping!
Is this one of the first posts that you're seeing about Lisk? See more at Lisk.io or Github.