I'll take a look at this soon. Maybe by next week's coding time. Regarding copier, is cookiecutter deprecated? it's last commit was 5 days ago. And I know folks are using cruft now to manage project templates. I'm not familiar with copier but I'll take a look.

Yes, it seems people still commit to coockiecutter but there hasn't been a release in over a year. I checked the issues at the time and it seemed the main maintainers where MIA, but maybe not. I didn't know cruft but I'm not super attached to copier either. I think any of them are probably good enough for our needs ... including an old version of cookiecutter.

I'm testing this out. When I run uvx copier copy --trust gh:sdss/python_template /Users/brian/Work/git/sdss/test_project I get an error. I get the same thing pointing to my local checkout of the branch. This shouldn't depend on cookiecutter, right?

  File "<template>", line 1, in top-level template code
  File "/Users/brian/.local/share/uv/tools/copier/lib/python3.10/site-packages/jinja2/sandbox.py", line 319, in getattr
    value = getattr(obj, attribute)
jinja2.exceptions.UndefinedError: 'cookiecutter' is undefined

I think that's because it's defaulting to the main branch which still has references to cookiecutter since this is not yet merged. Can you try uvx copier copy --trust --vcs-ref python-template-v3 gh:sdss/python_template /Users/brian/Work/git/sdss/test_project?

That worked. I'm surprised it didn't work when it was pointed to the local branch checkout.

One quick question on the uv venv setup: What determines which python version it creates the venv for? It defaults to 12, whether I created it from a different env or not. Are we able to have a question asking which python version to use?

I'll keep playing around with this.

I included a question to add a Dockerfile and GitHub action. I tested it and I think it works. Can you have a look at the code and the documentation?

I like the idea of allowing to update projects generated with the template. I will probably require a bit of testing and playing around with the options.

I think an automated conversion tool from v1 and v2 may be difficult to write since those versions had some many forking paths, but maybe we can include some documentation on how to do it manually.

This is looking good. The Docker addition seems reasonable to me, and the docs look fine. If we're coding today, we can touch base on this. I'd also like to trial and test the project update, but that can also be done outside this PR, if we want.

I was travelling this week and wasn't able to call to the coding meeting. Let's discuss it next Thursdays and maybe merge. We can test the update system and confirm it works.

I think I addressed the things we discussed today:

• The questionnaire ask for a minimum Python version which is used in pyproject.toml, the Dockerfile, and to determine the test matrix.
• The questionnaire asks whether to include framework packages. sdss-access, sdss-tree, and sdssdb are added if so.
• Added some instructions on how to start using the rendered template to the README.md.

Please have a look and let me know how those look.

I tested this. I found one issue with this question "🐍 The minimum Python version required to use the project (>= 3.8).
3.13". I specified to use 3.13 but the version of Python that got installed in the venv was 3.14.