This repository is a template repository (a cookiecutter) that allows you to quickly set up new Python packages. It is geared towards scientific applications and implements the best practice guidelines of the Scientific Software Center of Heidelberg University.

• Very simple, configurable setup of a fully functional project
• Modern build system metadata specification using pyproject.toml (PEP517 + PEP621)
• Based on an established tool: Cookiecutter has >17k stars on Github!
• Package versioning integrated with Git repository using setuptools_scm
• CI/CD configurations using Github Actions or Gitlab CI
• Sphinx documentation deployed to readthedocs.org

If your Python package contains compiled C++ modules, you might want to check out our C++ Cookiecutter with Pybind11 bindings instead.

In order to use Python Package Cookiecutter you need the following software installed:

• Python >= 3.10
• Cookiecutter e.g. by doing pip install cookiecutter.
• Git >= 1.8.2

Simply run the cookiecutter command line interface:

cookiecutter gh:ssciwr/cookiecutter-python-package

This will start an interactive prompt that will configure and generate your project. One of the prompts will ask you for a remote repository URL, so you should head to the Git hosting service of your choice and add a new empty repository e.g. on Github.

This cookiecutter accepts the following configuration options:

• project_name: The human-readable name of the project, defaults to My Project
• remote_url: The remote URL for the newly created repository. This is not only used to add it as a remote to the Git repository, but also to enable integration with some services. Defaults to None although we strongly advise you to specify it.
• project_slug: This will be the name of the generated directory.By default, it is deduced from the specified remote URL and the given project name.
• full_name: Author name, defaults to Your Name
• license adds a license file to the repository. It can be chosen from MIT (default), BSD-2, GPL-3.0, LGPL-3.0 or it can be omitted.
• github_actions_ci: Whether to add CI/CD workflows for Github Actions
• gitlab_ci: Whether to add a CI workflow for GitLab CI
• notebooks: Whether you want to use Jupyter Notebooks for documentation, demonstration and testing purposes. Will automatically render an example notebook into your Sphinx documentation and run it during test suite execution.
• commandlineinterface: Whether the Package should have a CLI based on click.

If you are using cookiecutter-python-package a lot, you can customize your default values by providing a .cookiecutterrc file in your home directory, for more details see the cookiecutter documentation.

Please report any issues you might have with template using the Github issue tracker