career-ops-template-template

The scaffold for building a career-ops template pack. It is itself a valid, installable pack (id example) with one plain CV and cover-letter pair, the pack validator, the authoring guide, and the full CI and release setup a real pack needs. Copy it, claim your own design, and publish.

What a template pack is

A template pack is passive data: HTML templates, preview PNGs, and a pack.json manifest. career-ops renders your cv.md through a chosen template to produce a PDF resume or a cover letter. A pack ships alternative CV and cover-letter designs, all single-column and ATS-safe. Core never executes pack code: installing a pack copies files, nothing more. That is the whole security model, and it is why a pack needs no hooks, no environment, and no network.

Use this repository

Click "Use this template" on GitHub, or clone it, then:

1. Pick a pack id (kebab-case). Set pack.json id, name (must equal career-ops-template-<id>), displayName, and homepage.
2. Read docs/AUTHORING.md. It carries the design-lever taxonomy, the pack-wide invariants, the placeholder contracts, and the render contract. The first exercise is to claim your own coordinate in the taxonomy and diverge from the plain example.
3. Rename the template files to cv-template.<id>.html and cover-letter-template.<id>.html, restyle them, and regenerate the previews (npm run previews:setup once, then npm run previews).
4. Run npm install && npm run validate until it passes.

The example theme is deliberately plain (Georgia serif, monochrome, full-width ruled headers) so nobody ships it as-is mistaking it for a finished design. It is the baseline you move away from.

Install a pack (today)

Installing a pack is copying its template files into your career-ops checkout:

cp templates/cv-template.example.html            /path/to/career-ops/templates/
cp templates/cover-letter-template.example.html  /path/to/career-ops/templates/

career-ops discovers templates by filename convention and reads each file's own <!-- career-ops-template --> meta block, then lists them for selection when you generate a PDF or a cover letter. There are no core changes to make: the naming convention is the contract. A future templates registry will add install verbs, and the pack.json here is already the manifest that registry will consume.

Validate

npm install        # dev tooling only (Prettier, commitlint); a pack has no runtime dependencies
npm run validate   # shape, ATS, and render checks against pack.json
npm test           # the validator's own unit tests
npm run smoke      # the pack must validate against its own manifest
npm run format:check

The validator (validate-template-pack.mjs) is dependency-free and is the single source of truth for what a pack must satisfy: pack.json shape, filename convention, placeholder completeness, and the ATS and render contract (system fonts only, pt-only font sizes at or above 10pt, no webfonts or images or tables, one grayscale-safe accent that never touches body copy). This same file is vendored unchanged into the reactive pack.

Publish

Push to a public repository named career-ops-template-<id>, keep CI green, and cut a release. release-please reads your Conventional Commits, proposes the version bump, and keeps pack.json version in lockstep with the tag.

What is in here

Path	Purpose
pack.json	the pack manifest (id, templates, levers, attribution)
templates/	the CV and cover-letter HTML plus their preview PNGs
validate-template-pack.mjs	the dependency-free pack validator
test/validate.test.mjs	the validator's unit tests
test/smoke.mjs	self-check: this pack validates against its own manifest
docs/AUTHORING.md	the authoring guide, including the design-lever taxonomy

Related

The reactive pack is fifteen finished theme pairs built on exactly this scaffold. Read it as a set of worked examples.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. The plain example derives from the Reactive Resume rhyhorn template by Amruth Pillai (MIT), reimplemented as ATS-safe HTML.

Contributors