Using and Mastering Cookiecutter Transcripts
Chapter: Creating Cookiecutter templates
Lecture: Template extensions
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0:01
Remember this cool Cookiecutter template. It has some really interesting things we entered a project name
0:08
and it generate the slug, and it also asks for the release statement, it said wait, that's today, this is actually when I ran it,
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now this is when I wrote the slide, but whatever, this is the date generated as the project or as the template is executed
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to generate a project, so this is not actually a part of Cookiecutter, this capability does not exist in Jinja2 either, in fact,
0:29
what this is is an extension to Jinja2 itself which we can plug in to Cookiecutter, let's see how that works.
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Over here, we have a list of extensions for Jinja, you can see it talks about how to add them,
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some internationalization stuff, expressions, loops, with statements, auto escaping extensions, and in fact, there is a whole API to write your own,
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and some people have, so if we go over to GitHub and do a search for Jinja2 extension, you can see there is at least 25 of them on GitHub,
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so some about time, this one we're actually going to use, some about Markdown, some about highlighting code,
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and some about Jinja and some about Django here, things like that. So these extensions are really helpful, and we can use them inside of Cookiecutter.
1:13
Unfortunately, the way they get sort of setup is not super amazing, in order to use these extensions, you basically have to
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install the system, so let's give this a shot and see how it works. So over here, let's look at this first, so what I have done is
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I have put the syntax to generate a year month day expression based on datetime.now, right, so here you can say I'm in a run
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now I'm going to feed it this local time operator here and this is the extension stuff, so if I try to run this, this is not built in anywhere,
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this is an extension that actually comes off of a place called PyPi, the package manager for Python, it's not on my system,
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I can go and try to run it, and it will say no, no, we cannot do this, there is no module named jinja2_time, if I type pip list, you'll see yeah,
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there is Jinja but there is no Jinja time. So here is the bummer deal, if I want to do this,
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if I want to actually have access to these extensions, here is the thing, I have to outside of Cookiecutter pip install jinja2-time
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I'm just going to go and download that, put it in my system, and now if I pip list you can see Jinja2-time
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Okay so that is step 1, the other thing to do is something that we can do for the users, right, we need to come down here
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and say we're going to have an _extensions, I believe that's a list, with the proper assignment there,
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okay, it looks like we're missing a coma up here but, we've got our extensions and our extension is jinja2-time and now we're using it right here,
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notice there is some of these things are underscore that apply to Cookiecutter that are not themselves prompt,
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it obviously won't ask us what extension do we want here, so let's try this, alright, so let's give this a shot, oh woops,
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I still made a mistake here, I need actually not quite like this, I need the .TimeExtension
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There we go, okay, try again, excellent, it looks like it's working, right,
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so my project will be timed project, and it's going to say time-project, beautiful, I'll take that, the creator, I still got to work on this, it's me,
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created on look at that, that is today. So that comes out of our now extension, and because we've installed jinja2-time
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as a package and then over here, we've imported the .TimeExtension, then we're good to go and I think created right now makes a lot of sense,
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and you know what, I am feeling like cyan, boom, done. Now, I don't actually put this value into our files, we didn't reference cookiecutter.created_on
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but if we wanted to it would be the value of that string right there.