Usage
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 Cookieninja project template, for handy future use.
Generate your project
Then generate your project from the project template:
$ cookieninja cookieninja-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.)
Note
see Command Line Options for extra command line arguments
Try it out!
Works directly with git and hg (mercurial) repos too
To create a project from the cookieninja-pypackage.git repo template:
$ cookieninja gh:audreyfeldroy/cookiecutter-pypackage
Cookieninja knows abbreviations for Github (gh), Bitbucket (bb), and
GitLab (gl) projects, but you can also give it the full URL to any
repository:
$ cookieninja https://github.com/audreyfeldroy/cookiecutter-pypackage.git
$ cookieninja git+ssh://git@github.com/audreyfeldroy/cookiecutter-pypackage.git
$ cookieninja hg+ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage
You will be prompted to enter a bunch of project config values. (These are defined in the project’s cookiecutter.json.)
Then, Cookieninja 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:
$ cookieninja https://github.com/audreyfeldroy/cookiecutter-pypackage.git --checkout develop
Works with private repos
If you want to work with 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:
$ cookieninja hg+https://example.com/repo
In addition, one can provide a path to the cookieninja stored on a local server:
$ cookieninja file://server/folder/project.git
Works with git submodules
If you have complex structures where different templates need to be combined, you could use git submodules in your template. Then, by passing the parameter ‘–recurse-submodules’ all submodules from your project will be also downloaded allowing you to used them in your project.
$ cookiecutter hg+https://example.com/repo –recurse-submodules
In addition, one can combine it with post processing functions in order to have even more flexibility.
Works with Zip files
You can also distribute cookieninja templates as Zip files. To use a Zip file template, point cookieninja at a Zip file on your local machine:
$ cookieninja /path/to/template.zip
Or, if the Zip file is online:
$ cookieninja https://example.com/path/to/template.zip
If the template has already been downloaded, or a template with the same name has already been downloaded, you will be prompted to delete the existing template before proceeding.
The Zip file contents should be the same as a git/hg repository for a template - that is, the zipfile should unpack into a top level directory that contains the name of the template. The name of the zipfile doesn’t have to match the name of the template - for example, you can label a zipfile with a version number, but omit the version number from the directory inside the Zip file.
If you want to see an example Zipfile, find any Cookieninja repository on Github and download that repository as a zip file - Github repository downloads are in a valid format for Cookieninja.
Password-protected Zip files
If your repository Zip file is password protected, Cookieninja will prompt you for that password whenever the template is used.
Alternatively, if you want to use a password-protected Zip file in an automated environment, you can export the COOKIECUTTER_REPO_PASSWORD environment variable; the value of that environment variable will be used whenever a password is required.