Usage¶

Grab a Cookiecutter template¶

First, clone a Cookiecutter project template:

$ git clone git@github.com:audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage.git

Make your changes¶

Modify the variables defined in cookiecutter.json.

Open up the skeleton project. If you need to change it around a bit, do so.

You probably also want to create a repo, name it differently, and push it as your own new Cookiecutter project template, for handy future use.

Generate your project¶

Then generate your project from the project template:

$ cookiecutter cookiecutter-pypackage/

The only argument is the input directory. (The output directory is generated by rendering that, and it can’t be the same as the input directory.)

Try it out!

Works directly with git and hg (mercurial) repos too¶

To create a project from the cookiecutter-pypackage.git repo template:

$ cookiecutter gh:audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage

Cookiecutter knows abbreviations for Github (gh) and Bitbucket (bb) projects, but you can also give it the full URL to any repository:

$ cookiecutter https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage.git

You will be prompted to enter a bunch of project config values. (These are defined in the project’s cookiecutter.json.

Then, Cookiecutter will generate a project from the template, using the values that you entered. It will be placed in your current directory.

And if you want to specify a branch you can do that with:

$ cookiecutter https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage.git --checkout develop

Works with private repos¶

If you want to work repos that are not hosted in github or bitbucket you can indicate explicitly the type of repo that you want to use prepending hg+ or git+ to repo url:

$ cookiecutter hg+https://example.com/repo

Keeping your cookiecutters organized¶

As of the Cookiecutter 0.7.0 release:

• Whenever you generate a project with a cookiecutter, the resulting project is output to your current directory.
• Your cloned cookiecutters are stored by default in your ~/.cookiecutters/ directory (or Windows equivalent). The location is configurable: see Advanced Usage for details.

Pre-0.7.0, this is how it worked:

• Whenever you generate a project with a cookiecutter, the resulting project is output to your current directory.
• Cloned cookiecutters were not saved locally.