Placeholder reference

Every placeholder Prefab fills in for you, the transforms that reshape a value on its way in, and the extra tokens that only mean something for a file arriving in a watched folder.

Built-in placeholders

These four fill themselves. They are never part of the deploy prompt, and Prefab never remembers them between deploys - pinning last month's date would be worse than working it out again.

{{author}} produces nothing until you set a name in Settings. {{folder}} is the name of the folder you dropped the template onto, not its full path.

The date format is a setting rather than a per-template choice, so {{date}} reads the same way everywhere. See Settings and permissions.

Transforms

Any placeholder can be reshaped on its way in, by adding a colon and the transform's name: {{client_name:kebab}}. Transforms work everywhere placeholders do - folder names, file names, file contents, terminal commands and watched-folder patterns alike.

lower and upper change the letters and nothing else, punctuation included. The other four break the value into words at anything that is not a letter or a number, which is why the brackets in Acme Rebrand (v2) disappear rather than turning into stray dashes.

The difference between kebab and slug is accents. Both give lower-case words joined by hyphens, but slug folds accented letters down to their plain equivalents. Use slug for anything that has to travel through a URL, and kebab when the name should still read as it was written.

Transform names are not case sensitive. One Prefab does not recognise is ignored, and the value goes in unchanged.

Tokens for a file in a watched folder

A watched folder renames what lands in it using a name pattern. A pattern can use everything above, plus these, which describe the file itself. See Rule reference.

{{captured}} reads the date out of the image's EXIF or TIFF data, and falls back to the file's own dates when there is none. {{file_date}} uses the creation date, falling back to the modification date. Either can carry a format of its own in place of the one from Settings: {{captured:yyyy-MM}}.

Your own placeholders work too, but their values are frozen: they are the answers you gave when the folder was deployed, copied into the folder at that moment. A pattern is applied to a file weeks later, when there is nobody to ask. The built-ins are frozen the same way, so {{date}} in a pattern is the day the folder was made rather than today.

What a pattern may produce

A pattern names a file, not a path. Slashes and colons become hyphens, the extension is kept as it was, and a pattern that resolves to nothing at all leaves the file's name alone.

The move to subfolder rule is the exception. There a slash does mean a level of nesting, so {{client_name}}/{{date}} files things two deep, and a pattern that would climb out of the watched folder is trimmed back until it cannot. The five tokens in the table above belong to the rename pattern alone. A subfolder pattern has the folder's own values and nothing more.

Date formats

The format after the colon is a standard date pattern. The letters used most often:

Tokens for a shell command rule

The shell command rule in a watched folder hands the file to a command of your own, and adds three tokens to the ones the folder already carries. See Terminal commands.

Quote {{file}} when you use it, because paths contain spaces. Inside this rule {{folder}} is a full path rather than the built-in's folder name.

sips -Z 2000 "{{file}}"

This is the one rule Prefab cannot undo. By the time the run is recorded the command has already done whatever it does.