Cookiecutter

Cookiecutter is a command-line tool used to create structured projects from a template. It’s a widely-used tool in the industry and it also support engineers to customize their own templates and share with others. In this post, I would like to.share some basic information about cookiecutter.

Introduction

Consider a scenario that your organization maintains a brunch of repositories. And everytime when you try to add one, you want it generated automatically with a basic template, like containing a README, LICENSE. Moreover, you may also want to generate makefiles automatically to build a project. All of these requirements makes cookiecutter a good choice for us. We can define the project template and then use it later for more than one time.

How to use it?

First you need to install the command line (Installation Guid). There are different ways to install on different platforms.

After installation, you can use it. But you need a template. You can use either a public template (Usually on Github) or a local one. I created a simple cookiecutter template to generate a project that contains a python file.

$ cookiecutter https://github.com/leungyukshing/cookiecutter-simple.git

Then you can see the command line will prompt you to enter some information about the project with provided default values.

Make your own template

Using cookiecutter is very easy and I think making our own template is more important. Bascally we use {{cookiecutter.[name]}} to define the parameters. Then we provide a cookiecutter.json to provide default values for each parameters. After generation, all the {{cookiecutter.[name]}} will be replaced by the actual value of [name], which could be a default one or from user’s input.