What are GitHub Templates?

Templates allow developers start a new repository by reusing an existing codebase in a different repository. Even though sharing boilerplates is a common practice among teams, the novelty comes in that now this process is fully automated. The template is maintained and versioned as a standalone repository which can be updated independently, facilitating collaboration and code reusability. Templates are a feature introduced by GitHub on mid 2019. Check out the original announcement blog by GitHub.

RidgeRun loves automation and collaboration. Even though build systems are an essential part of any project, they rarely add value to the end user (from a customer perspective). They're best known as a necessary evil on every project. Instead of having informal boilerplates hidden in each engineer's machine, we've centralized them in RidgeRun's GitHub organization encouraging developers to continuously improve them, correct any defect they found on the way or exploit their creativity by adding new cool features.

We'd like to share these templates with you. Feel free to use them if you find them useful, provide feedback and, of course, share back your improvements. The following sections describe in better detail how to use these templates.

List of Existing Templates

We try to organize our templates in a tree fashion. Even though GitHub repository names are strictly flat, our naming convention is such that must adhere to this structure. The following table summarizes the existing templates and the overall organization.

Template Namespace	Build System	Variant	Framework	Description	URL
Templates	Autotools	rr-build-utils	GStreamer	Autotools based project for Gstreamer plug-ins. It uses a set of common utils called rr-build-utils which includes support for testing, documentation, coverage, linting and more.	templates-autotools-rrbuildutils-gstreamer
Templates	Meson	standard	GStreamer	Meson based project for Gstreamer plug-ins.	templates-meson-standard-gstreamer