🚀 create-drogon-app

A tiny Node.js CLI that scaffolds a ready-to-build Drogon (C++) backend. It copies the template from templates/drogon-starter into a new folder.

✨ What you get

The generated project includes:

• ⚙️ CMake project (CMake >= 3.15)
• 📦 Conan dependency management (drogon/1.9.12)
• 🐘 PostgreSQL dev database via docker compose
• 🐳 A Dockerfile to build/run the app in a container
• 🩺 A sample GET /health route
• 🔌 Loads PORT from .env (defaults to 3000)

✅ Prerequisites

For the generator

• Node.js (recommended: an active LTS)
• npm

For building the generated C++ project

• C++17 toolchain (e.g. GCC/Clang)
• CMake >= 3.15
• Python 3 + pip
• Conan
• Docker (optional, used for PostgreSQL and/or building the image)

📥 Install

Option A (recommended): use as a starter via npm

npm create drogon-app@latest my-service

Then:

cd my-service

If your npm version requires -- to pass args, use: npm create drogon-app@latest -- my-service.

Option B: use locally from this repo (development)

# from the repo root
npm install -g .
create-drogon-app my-service

Option C: run without installing globally

node ./bin/index.js my-service

🧪 Usage

Create a new Drogon project:

npm create drogon-app@latest my-service
cd my-service

The CLI prints basic build commands. For a more complete local setup (recommended), run:

# 1) local env + config
cp .env.example .env
cp config/config.example.json config/config.json

# 2) (optional) start Postgres
docker compose up -d

# 3) install dependencies
conan profile detect --force
conan install . --output-folder=build --build=missing -s build_type=Release

# 4) configure + build
cmake --preset conan-release
cmake --build --preset conan-release

# 5) run
./build/Drogon_Starter

Hit the health endpoint:

curl -s http://localhost:3000/health

🗂️ Template details

The template lives at:

• templates/drogon-starter/

It is copied as-is into your new project directory. For full template documentation, see:

• templates/drogon-starter/README.md

🛠️ How it works

• Entry point: bin/index.js
• It reads the project name from the first CLI argument.
• It copies templates/drogon-starter to ./<projectName> using Node’s fs.cpSync(..., { recursive: true }).

🧩 Development (this repo)

Typical workflow:

# edit files under templates/drogon-starter/
node ./bin/index.js _tmp_test_app
rm -rf _tmp_test_app

📄 License

MIT