Project Scaffolding That Evolves With Your Software Using Copier

Summary

Every software project has a certain amount of boilerplate to handle things like linting rules, test configuration, and packaging. Rather than recreate everything manually every time you start a new project you can use a utility to generate all of the necessary scaffolding from a template. This allows you to extract best practices and team standards into a reusable project that will save you time. The Copier project is one such utility that goes above and beyond the bare minimum by supporting project evolution, letting you bring in the changes to the source template after you already have a project that you have dedicated significant work on. In this episode Jairo Llopis explains how the Copier project works under the hood and the advanced capabilities that it provides, including managing the full lifecycle of a project, composing together multiple project templates, and how you can start using it for your own work today.

Announcements

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Jairo Llopis about Copier, a library for managing project templates

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• Can you start by describing what the Copier project is?
  • How did you get involved in the project?
  • Can you share some of the history of the project?
• What do you see as the most common uses for a project templating tool?
• There are a variety of different tools for scaffolding projects across a wide range of languages. What are the distinguishing features of Copier that might lead someone to choose it over the alternatives?
• Can you describe how the Copier project is implemented?
  • How has the design and feature set evolved over time?
• What is the workflow for someone building a template with Copier?
  • What are some of the edge cases or complexities that they might run into?
• What are the options for extensibility or integration with Copier?
• What are some of the capabilities or use cases for Copier that are often overlooked?
• What are some of the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Copier used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on and with Copier?
• When is Copier the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of the project?

Keep In Touch

• Yajo on GitHub
• __yajo on Twitter
• Website

Picks

• Tobias
  • Playing Cards
• Jairo
  • Mozilla Hubs

Links

• Copier
• Tecnativa
• Odoo Open Source ERP
• Cookiecutter
• Yeoman
• Jinja
• Cookiecutter, Yeoman, and Copier Blog Post
• doodba-copier-template
• Copier Templates
• A Story of Duplicate Code
• Traefik

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA