How I Created Over 100 Open Source Applications Using Automation Tools

We present you a translation of the Sm0ke article published on dev.to. The author talks about his experience in generating web applications and how to automate the process of creating them.

Hello coders!

I am a freelance developer and I have generated over 100 applications in various languages ​​and platforms using automation tools, HTML parsing and boilerplate code .

All my applications, both paid and free, are in the open GitHub repository. I will talk about some of them in this article.

# 1 Generated JAMstack Applications

In total, I have created more than 40 such applications. The design for them was developed by well-known web agencies.

• Free MIT licensed apps - Argon Design , Material Kit , Now UI , Paper Kit .
• Free applications licensed under CCA 3.0 (when using them, you must save information about authorship) - Fractal , Landed , BigPicture .

# 2 Generated Flask Applications

All these applications, both paid and free, use a boilerplate, SQLite database, ORM, authentication, helpers and a basic set of tools (static export via Frozen-Flask and an FTP deployment script).

• Free MIT licensed apps - Paper Kit , FlaskPlay .
• Free applications licensed under CCA 3.0 (when using them, you must save information about authorship) - Phantom , SolidState .

# 3 Generated admin panels

All my admin panels are created using Flask and use the SQLite database, authentication, ORM and a basic set of tools (a full list of panels can be seen here ).

Here are some panels: Flask Dashboard Argon , Flask Dashboard Material and Flask Dashboard NowUi . All of them are licensed by MIT.

Other generated applications and boilerplates

• Full Stack - applications with a two-tier architecture, as well as Vue and React (at the interface level). Have a MIT license.
• The boilerplate code for Node.js, Laravel and Flask - also with a MIT license.

About the automation process

Once I decided to simplify the process of creating applications. Based on my freelance experience over the past two years, as well as customer requirements and feedback, I made the following conclusions:

• Customers always need several designs for the application (so that there is plenty to choose from).
• My applications must be compatible with even the latest devices.
• It is necessary that the migration of legacy versions of applications to new devices fit into a small budget.

To solve these problems, the development process had to be automated. In my case, it took several steps:

• We extract components for various template engines (Jinja2, Pug, Blade) from simple HTML files using an HTML parser .
• We embed the processed design into the existing boilerplate code - Laravel , Node.js , JAMstack or Flask .
• Run the minimum number of autotests.

Further steps

• Extending the HTML parser to convert legacy HTML designs to Vue, React, and Angular themes.
• We are preparing themes for modern frameworks (Gatsby.js, Gridsome, Hugo), starting with the design created on Bootstrap.
• We transfer designs from previous versions of the CSS framework (Bootstrap) to Bulma and Tailwind.
• We add more boilerplates to the pipeline - for example, for Django, Fastify and similar frameworks.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!