File info: autotune config.json

/autotune-config.json

This file in the blueprint's repo provides important data about the blueprint to Autotune. This file must be formatted correctly in order for Autotune to load the blueprint. Blueprints with incorrectly formatted autotune-config.json files will be marked as broken.

Blueprint Metadata

Field	Required	Type	Purpose
name	true	string	Blueprint name.
instructions	false	markdown	Instructions for users making projects from the blueprint. Displayed on the sidebar of the projects page.
type	true	string	Blueprint and project type. Used in the type filter on the blueprints and projects pages.
tags	false	array of strings	Blueprints and Projects tags. Used to filter the projects on projects page.
themes	false	array	List of themes that this blueprint supports. Defaults to all themes.
thumbnail	false	string	Relative path to a thumbnail to use for the blueprint. Used on the blueprint page and new project page.
authors	false	array of strings	Name and email of the blueprint author
deploy_dir	false	string	Deploy this directory when build is completed. This should be a relative path to where your static site generator puts it's built files. Defaults to build.
form	true	json	This field should be a valid Alpaca form. Autotune uses this to generate input form for projects created form this blueprint.

Creating Alpaca forms

Alpaca is a library that converts JSON schemas into HTML forms. Autotune uses Alpaca for creating project input forms.

Sample form

For instance, JSON snippet below will generate a form with a text input field and a drop down as shown in the image.

{
  "schema": {
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
      "message": {
        "title": "Message",
        "type": "string",
        "required": false
      }
    }
  },
  "options": {
    "fields": {
      "message":{
          "helper": "Add message to be displayed here."
      }
    }
  }
}

As noted above, Autotune does require that a few specific fields be included in autotune-config.json. Therefore, simply dropping the code block above into autotune-config.json would not work. Check out the autotune-config.json in the example blueprint created in this tutorial to see an example of a correctly formatted autotune-config.json file.

Form builder

Autotune, conveniently, provides a form builder for creating forms for your blueprints. You can access it at http://[AUTOTUNE_LOCATION]/blueprints/[BLUEPRINT_NAME]/builder

Changes to the JSON on the right will be reflected on the form on the left immediately.

Configuration options

Alpaca provides a variety of field types along with options for validation on specific types of fields. View Alpaca's documentation to read more about these fields and experiment with code snippets provided on its site.

Configuration for more complex blueprints

Conveniently, Alpaca provides support for dependencies. As per its documentation,

JSON Schema provides support for dependencies as a means for describing dependencies between fields. Using dependencies, you can establish that property2 should be supplied when property1 is supplied.

Basically, this means that you can configure fields to only show up when when certain criteria are met, and be hidden otherwise. This comes in very handy, say, when you're building a chart blueprint and need to configure the form so that specific fields only show up for certain types of charts.

Here's an example of showing and hiding fields based on the type of chart selected by the user: