Using and Mastering Cookiecutter Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: Welcome and what is Cookiecutter
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Hello and welcome to "Using and Mastering Cookiecutter". I'm really excited that you are taking this course
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and that you are interested into looking into Cookiecutter. It's a fantastic tool and it's really powerful,
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I think you are going to learn and appreciate a lot of that power, in this course. Let's begin by answering the question what is Cookiecutter?
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Well, we can create a template, a set of files for any given project, this could be a Python application, this could be an Apple application,
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this could even just be some scientific research project template that doesn't have any code at all, we're going to create this template
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and we're going to feed it to the Cookiecutter engine. Now, this could be Python, it could be C++, it could be C#,
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the language of the template is irrelevant, it's about managing files and resources and creating project structure from some source template
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and asking the user a certain number of questions, so things like what is your project called, are you going to deploy this to the cloud,
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what ORM are you going to use and so on. So we are going to take the template and feed this information into Cookiecutter
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and out pops a brand new shiny, ready to start project. So that is what Cookiecutter is. It takes templates called Cookiecutters,
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and it generates via asking the users a couple of questions, project templates for any type of app that you want to get started with.
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Cookiecutter was created by Audrey Roy Greenfeld, back in 2013, you may know Audrey from the Two Scoops of Django,
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she and her husband Danny wrote this book and it's very well known Django book,
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you can read Danny's announcement of the Cookiecutter project here at this url,
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when they first launched it, it will give you a little background information on what Cookiecutter is and why they created it.
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So, when and how do you use Cookiecutter? I think there is two cases, on one hand you might just be
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a user who wants to just consume Cookiecutter templates, I want to create a new Django project that is set up just so based on a Cookiecutter template,
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I want to create a new Pyramid web app based on a Cookiecutter template. So, for these types of users, there is certain benefits,
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first of all, you can easily create very complex and intricate projects,
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the Cookiecutter can be set up to create the project however it needs to be done, and all you have to do is answer a few basic questions,
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and instead of worrying about what files you have to create, how they are relatively located to each other, things like that, the formats,
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you just answer a few questions and boom, you have some new app ready to roll.
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It makes the process of creating projects very repeatable, and that is nice. It also is faster onboarding for new developers,
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so instead of teaching developers all the things you need to know about the layout and structure of a project, you can just say run this command,
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Cookiecutter (space) my template name, and boom, they are ready to go. On the other hand, you might want to create Cookiecutter template,
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maybe you work at a company and you want to create a Cookiecutter template for your team or your organization,
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or you might run an open source project where you want to create a template for users of that open source project.
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So here you can possibly increase adoption of your project, maybe it was something that was kind of hard to get started with,
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and now because you have a simple template to do so, it's easy, you can reduce support costs or support effort right,
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you won't have to answer those, well, how do I get started, how do I do this thing, or how do I set up that to get this thing to run,
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your Cookiecutter template will get them beyond the initial setup steps so you basically can skip a bunch of those questions and challenges.
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You can help users fall into the pit of success, by that I mean you can setup your project, so that everything is set up
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in the best possible way before they even start to touch it, and give them the guidance to get going, not just creating the file structure and so on,
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but actually asking them the right questions. And as you will see in the programmatic part, you can even wrap this up in a little application,
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that makes this process of creation even nicer. And, you could gain more exposure for your project,
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if it's an open source project, you could get that project listed in the Cookiecutter documentation saying here is a way to create this cool project,
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people might look at that and go oh, I didn't know that existed, let me check that out, and of course, it will be easy for them to do so,
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because they just have to run your template. Finally, if you work inside a company, this can provide a lot of consistency across your organization.
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If the way all new projects that your company created is by running a certain Cookiecutter template for your technology,
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then you can be sure that there is a minimum level of consistency across all those projects and if you have a lot of projects,
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a lot of developers all working in parallel, this can be super valuable if you invest into these templates. So, this is just some of the use cases
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and some of the reasons that you might use Cookiecutter. We'll talk about a whole bunch more as you go through this course.