ModInfGen

ModInfGen (Module Info Generator) is a tool written in java that can generate a module-info.java file from a *.json config file module-info.json5.

But why would you want to use this tool over manually writing your module-info.java? Well, ModInfGen has support for several utilities that make your life easier.

Unique Features

• module root expansion (e.g. . $\rightarrow$ com.example.project)
• automatically injected comments
• better structure than the linear structure of module-info.java
• variables

Module root expansion

Why would you want to type your root module over and over when it could be easier? Here's an example of the feature in use:

{
    "module": "com.example.project",
    "exports": [
        ".",    // expanded to "com.example.project"
        ".core" // "com.example.project.core"
    ]
}

Automatically injected comments

You can declare comments which will be automatically injected into the generated module-info.java, the placement of these comments is determined by the section the comments are assigned to. Below is an example:

{
    // ...
	
    "comments": {
        "header": "This is a test header comment",
        "footer": "This is the closing comment",
        "requires": "Dependencies are below",
        "exports": "These modules are exported",
        "opens": "These modules are opened to reflection", 
        "legacy": "These are the legacy lines"
    }
    
    // ...
}

Details about the sections can be found in this documentation.

Variables

Variables can be declared in the variables section and can be used anywhere in module-info.json5 except for the variables section.

Variable names must follow these rules to be considered valid:

• must start with $
• following the $ must be a lowercase letter (a-z)
• following that can be any of the following characters:
  • a-z and A-Z
  • 0-9
  • underscores _ and hyphens -

Example:

{
    "variables": {
        "$gson": "com.google.gson"
    },
    
    "requires": [
        "$gson"
    ]
}

The file module-info.json5

module-info.json5 is the file that essentially replaces module-info.java, as you can generate that file from your config in module-info.json5. If you are unfamiliar with *.json5-files, it's essentially JSON but with comments, which is the reason why it's used over plain JSON. The following fields can/must be declared in the config:

• module: The root module (e.g. com.example.project)
• source-root: The path to your source directory (e.g. src/main/java, optional)
• variables {}: Contains the key-value mappings for variable names to their value (optional)
• exports []: Contains a list of modules that are required by your project (optional)
• opens []: A list of declarations that exposes your packages to java's reflection for specified dependencies (optional)
• legacy []: A list of lines that follow the syntax of module-info.java, these lines are not validated by ModInfGen and are appended to the generated module-info.java
• comments {}: The comment mappings, supported keys are: header, footer, requires, exports, opens and legacy.

...WIP (further documentation coming in the future)...