There are a lot of different starters & boilerplate projects out there, especially for the frameworks/systems that are not tied up by conventions. From those quite widespread right now I would name angular (see angular seeds) and react to have quite a bit of those, each of which might bring some interesting ideas/tools/paradigms to the table.

There’re some minor things I would love to see less when people are providing instructions on using their seed/starter for starting project 1) Forgetting to specify --depth 1 as argument to git clone. Omitting that argument will mean cloning whole tree with history, which gets you extra overhead on space & waste more time to start the project (especially on slow bandwidth or for projects that have gone a loooong way and have hundreds/thousands of commits under the belt). 2) Suggesting using same git - not hinting on how to specify new remote url, or get rid of previous history, which caused the folder size to bloat (especially with conjunction with #1), etc.

To simplify this flow in case you’re quite frequent user, you might want to have some handy aliases. For some time I occasionally ran git clone https://github.com/%some-boilerplate-project%.git my-bp-project && cd $_ && rm -rf .git to get me a plain folder from which I could start building up, which ended up living in my alias section of .zshrc file.

So following are the examples of zshrc aliases (which should work on bash/sh with minor modifications (at some point I put it into separate template.sh file with #!env sh shebang and code did work although there were some changes regarding regex matching). Here, we have template alias which will use provided git URL (be it ssh/https ones you would copy from github/bitbucket or github username/reponame pair) & name of the folder (with fallback to boilerplate name itself as folder name) that it will proceed to clone to specified folder, remove original .git folder and init empty git repo. It will also save the git url to the ~/.last_template file (plain text file), which can be leveraged by last-template alias, which reuses last provided template and basically is template with default value of last used boilerplate provided via ~/.last_template file.

cloneCleanup() {
  # $1 - $GITREMOTE
  # $2 - $FOLDER_NAME
  echo "Will be setting up $GITREMOTE in $FOLDER_NAME"
  # Clone last commit, remove git folder, init empty git repo, save the last used template
  if git clone --depth 1 $1 $2 && cd $_ && rm -rf .git && git init && echo $1 > ~/.last_template ; then
    echo "Ready to work."
  else
    echo "Something went wrong."
  fi
}
scaffoldGithub() {
  # Script to scaffold project based on github repo
  GITREMOTE=$1
  # Handle username/reponame case
  if [[ "$1" =~ ^[A-Za-z0-9_-]+\/[A-Za-z0-9_-]+$ ]]
  then
    GITREMOTE="https://github.com/$1.git"
  fi
  # capture PROJECT_NAME part of git link (right before .git)
  REGEX="([A-Za-z0-9_-]+).git$"
  [[ "$GITREMOTE" =~ $REGEX  ]];
  PROJECT_NAME="${match}"
  # use provided folder name with fallback to project name
  FOLDER_NAME="${2:-$PROJECT_NAME}"
  cloneCleanup $GITREMOTE $FOLDER_NAME
}
simplifiedScaffoldGithub() {
  # Script to reuse last used template saved in ~/.last_commit
  GITREMOTE="`cat ~/.last_template`"
  # Throw in case user forgets to put in folder
  : ${1?"Usage: last-template foldername"}
  FOLDER_NAME="$1"
  cloneCleanup $GITREMOTE $FOLDER_NAME
}

alias template=scaffoldGithub
alias last-template=simplifiedScaffoldGithub

To add alias you will need to add them to one of your environment config files. I usually have put them into .(ba|z)shrc files. After adding aliases & reloading the environment (source ~/.zshrc in my case) you can use them. Sample usages:

template https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit.git my-killer-startup-secret-product
template roman01la/f-react-kit
last-template glorious-app

At some point I almost had published this as a separate tool (just a set of executable shell scripts & installation script to link those to usr/bin) on github, because only thing I’ve seen doing something similar was scaffoldinpy. Although it might be I just didn’t look hard enough for this. Will appreciate feedback on this.