I worked on a small node.js server during the past couple of weeks. The idea came from the fact that

1. I over and over again find myself creating Sense apps that are almost identical, and
2. people starting out as Sense developers spend too much time learning the basics. I wanted to bootstrap their learning process by providing well written skeleton apps for them.

This could of course be achieved by just duplicating apps using the QMC, but it would be way better if there was a nice little web app that listed the available Sense app templates, and allowed anyone (with permissions to create apps) to create new apps based on them. Or maybe this feature could even be integrated into one of the different Sense hubs that are now available…

Keep it simple

The app duplicator service is really quite simple, in its current form it exposes three endpoints:

• /getTemplateList
  Returns a JSON with information about the apps defined to be templates, using a custom property in the QMC
• /duplicateNewScript
  Duplicates the template app and replaces the new app’s script with a script retrieved from an online location, for example a file stored in GitHub. The new app is reloaded before saved to disk.
• /duplicateKeepScript
  Duplicates the template app and keeps the template’s script. The new app is reloaded before saved to disk.

No UI included

There is no user interface included. You will need to build your own, or adapt some existing web app to also use the duplicator service.

Maybe you could even open source your UI for the duplicator service, so others can benefit from it too? Sharing is caring, after all..

Happy holidays everyone!