Recipes

A recipe is a YAML file with four fields — name, language, archetype, and modules. The built-in recipes are embedded in the binary, but --recipe also accepts a file path, so you can ship your own:

keel new --recipe ./my-recipe.yaml

Writing one

modules is an ordered list. Each entry is either a bare string (a built-in module by name) or a source-qualified object (an external module):

name: go-service-lite
language: go
modules:
  - base-layout
  - go-mod
  - taskfile-go
  - lint-go
  - test-go
  - name: editorconfig
    source: { dir: ../external-module }   # relative to this recipe file

Field	Meaning
name	The recipe's name.
language	go, rust, or any — the recipe's toolchain.
archetype	service (default), library, or cli — whether the repo produces a binary.
modules	Ordered module list: built-in names and/or external entries.

Archetypes

archetype tells the modules whether the repo produces a binary. Omit it and you get service, which is what every recipe before this field did.

A library recipe drops the cmd/<name> entrypoint, the Taskfile's build task and its ldflags, the task build lines in README and CONTRIBUTING, .goreleaser.yaml, and the goreleaser job in release.yml. It keeps release-please, so a library is still tagged and still gets a changelog. In its place go-mod emits doc.go, <name>.go and <name>_test.go.

cli behaves exactly like service today — a CLI is a binary. It exists so that recipes can declare what they are.

Templates never test archetype directly. Rendering derives two more keys from it, and those are what modules use:

Key	Meaning
is_library	true only for archetype: library; every when: and template guard uses this
package_name	repo_name reduced to a legal Go package name (go-thing → gothing)

Language consistency

Every module in a recipe must be language-consistent: a module's language has to be any or match the recipe's language. A go module in a rust recipe (or vice-versa) is rejected — this is what keeps a scaffold's toolchain coherent.

A worked example

keel ships a complete custom recipe at examples/custom-recipe/recipe.yaml — a leaner Go composition than the built-in go-service, mixing built-in module names with a local external module. Run it against one of the example answers files:

keel new --recipe examples/custom-recipe/recipe.yaml \
  --answers examples/answers/local-only.yaml --no-input

See Modules for authoring the modules a recipe composes, and the normative Manifest schema for the exact field definitions.