I finally did it! I bootstrapped my first project with Cookiecutter. There is a lot to discover but wow this tool can save you a ton of time, making your project more professional.
This is just a quick article to document this nice tool brought to us by the authors of Two Scoops of Django.
Cookiecutter does one thing and it does it well – Daniel Roy Greenfeld
Installation
First I ran a pip install but I could not find it in my path so I went full force with:
brew install cookiecutter
That’s on Mac. On Ubuntu you would do:
sudo apt-get install cookiecutter
As it’s a tool I will use to boostrap various projects I think having it outside a virtualenv is justified.
How to start
The best place to check out is their latest documentation jumping straight to the usage section.
At first I pulled the repo and filled out the cookiecutter.json, a convenient defaults file for hands off (--no-input) project creation.
The interactive option is convenient too:
$ cookiecutter gh:audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage
full_name [Audrey Roy Greenfeld]: Bob Belderbos
email [aroy@alum.mit.edu]: info@bobbelderbos.com
github_username [audreyr]: bbelderbos
project_name [Python Boilerplate]: PyBites Hacktoberfest Checker
project_slug [pybites_hacktoberfest_checker]:
project_short_description [Python Boilerplate contains all the boilerplate you need to create a Python package.]: Checking number of PRs done in Oct for the Digital Ocean's Hacktoberfest challenge. Also my first Bottle app.
pypi_username [bbelderbos]:
version [0.1.0]:
use_pytest [n]: y
use_pypi_deployment_with_travis [y]:
Select command_line_interface:
1 - Click
2 - No command-line interface
Choose from 1, 2 [1]:
create_author_file [y]:
Select open_source_license:
1 - MIT license
2 - BSD license
3 - ISC license
4 - Apache Software License 2.0
5 - GNU General Public License v3
6 - Not open source
Choose from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 [1]:
I only then realized that there are project based cookiecutters so I picked the bottle one, the micro web-framework I want to use for our code challenge 38.
It could not be easier: just point to the Github repo. It is more bare bones than cookiecutter-pypackage though:
$ cookiecutter https://github.com/avelino/cookiecutter-bottle.git
full_name [Thiago Avelino]: Bob Belderbos
email [thiago@avelino.xxx]: info@bobbelderbos.com
github_username [avelino]: bbelderbos
project_name [My Bottle App]: PyBites Hacktoberfest Checker
app_name [mybottleapp]: hacktoberfestapp
project_short_description [A cookiecutter template for creating reusable Bottle projects quickly]: Checking number of PRs done in Oct for the Digital Ocean's Hacktoberfest challenge. Also my first Bottle app.
At this point you can cd into it, do a git init, make a virtual env and install the requirements:
$ virtualenv -p /Users/bbelderb/anaconda/bin/python venv
$ echo "venv" >> .gitignore
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ pip install -r requirements.txt
...
(venv) $ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bbelderb/code/hacktoberfestapp/.git/
(venv) $ git status
...
.gitignore
README.rst
hacktoberfestapp/
manage.py
requirements.txt
tests/
(venv) $ git add . && git commit -m "init commit"
(venv) $ python manage.py runserver
...
Listening on http://0.0.0.0:8080/
Nice:
And here is the directory structure with some bootstrap code:
Conclusion
I think the main take away is that Cookiecutter takes a lot of worries away regarding setup, folder structure, required files, etc. It might be overkill for some projects, but it does add consistency across your projects and endorses best practices.
I only scratched the service. I really would like to try cookiecutter-flask, cookiecutter-django and cookiecutter-django-rest for future projects. Or how to create our own PyBites Cookiecutter? And what about defining pre- and post-generate hooks (Python or shell scripts to run before or after generating a project)? Enough to explore for a follow-up article …
Feel free to share what you have used Cookiecutter for in the comments below.
Further resources
- Cookiecutter GH repo: lists of awesome features that make Cookiecutter a great tool. Scroll down to A Pantry Full of Cookiecutters for a list of cookiecutters (aka Cookiecutter project templates) for you to use or fork, there are a lot!
- Cookiecutter docs.
- Author’s post: Cookiecutter: Project Templates Made Easy introducing the project, including how to create your own cookiecutter templates.
- An > 3 hours in-depth video course by Michael Kennedy: Using and Mastering Cookiecutter.
Keep Calm and Code in Python!
— Bob