Creating and using API and Product definitions templates

You can use template files when creating API and Product definitions. Template files are Handlebars templates containing variables of the form {{variable-name}} that are substituted with values when you create the API or Product definition.

Before you begin

To complete the steps that are described in this topic, you must have installed the developer toolkit. For more information, see Installing the toolkit.

Procedure

Create a Product or API definition template, either from scratch, or by copying one of the examples provided in API and Product definition template examples. The template file must have .hbs filename extension, and may contain any of the handlebars variables described in Template variables for API and Product definitions.
To create a Product or API definition from a template, enter the following command:
```
apic create --type [api | product ] --template template_file --title product_title options
```
where template_file is the template .hbs file to use, product_title is the title of the Product to create, and options is any additional command-line options. The path to the template file can be either an absolute path or relative to the location where the command is executed. Alternatively, you can set the template-path configuration variable to the location of the directory containing the template.

When the Product or API definition is created, the value of each command-line option is substituted for the corresponding handlebars template variable. For example, the value of the required --title option is substituted for the info.title field in the template file. The command creates a Product definition YAML file with the name specified in the --name option. If you don't supply the --name option, the command derives the name of the Product YAML file from the specified title by down-casing the title and replacing spaces with dashes.
In addition to the --template option, you can set default values for working with templates by using these configuration variables:
- template-default-product - Base file name of the product template (.hbs) file.
- template-default-api - Base file name of the API template (.hbs) file.
- template-path - List of directories in which to search for templates. It may specify one or more directories (absolute paths). Separate multiple directories by a space and enclose in quotes. Note you can use this configuration variable along with the --template option.
As with all configuration variables, you can set these values locally (for a single application project) or globally (for all projects). For more information, see Toolkit command summary.