Piecutter is a library to add a Python configuration layer on top of cookiecutter. Piecutter allows for more complex behavior while prompting the user during project creation. Piecutter uses cookiecutter under the hood to generate new projects.

Where cookiecutter uses a cookiecutter.json file for template configuration, for example:

{
    "project_name": "My Project",
    "repo_name": "my-repo",
}

piecutter uses a piecutter_config.py file that defines a prompt_config function:

def prompt_config():
    return [
        {'name': 'project_name', 'prompt_type': 'text', 'default_value': 'My Project'},
        {'name': 'repo_name', 'prompt_type': 'text', 'default_value': 'my-repo'},
    ]

To convert an existing cookiecutter.json file to a piecutter_config.py file, piecutter will have a script that will be used like:

cookiecutter_to_piecutter.py ~/my_proj/cookiecutter.json -o ~/my_proj/piecutter_config.py

Piecutter is intended to be a lightweight library built on top of cookiecutter. Piecutter's project structure mirrors cookiecutter as much as possible. Ideally, piecutter will not require additional libraries beyond those already required by cookiecutter. Piecutter only supports Python 3.5+.

Piecutter will support the following config options:

• a description option to provide a more verbose description of a field.
• a clean_field_fn option to specify a function that validates and cleans user input and returns the cleaned value.
• a should_prompt_fn option to specify a function that uses existing context to determine whether to prompt for a field (for example, only prompt for field B if the value for field A was X).

Using these options would look something like this:

def prompt_config():
    return [
        {
            'name': 'repo_name', 'prompt_type': 'text', 'default_value': 'my-repo',
            'description': 'The name of your repository. For more info on how to name your repo, see http:// ...',
            'clean_field_fn': clean_repo_name,
            'should_prompt_fn': should_prompt_repo_name,
        },
    ]


def clean_repo_name(context):
    pass  # Function to validate, clean and return repo_name.


def should_prompt_repo_name(context):
    pass  # Use `context` to determine whether to prompt for repo_name field.