Let's pretend you want to create a Django project called "redditclone". Rather than using startproject and then editing the results to include your name, email, and various configuration issues that always get forgotten until the worst possible moment, get cookiecutter to do all the work.

First, get Cookiecutter. Trust me, it's awesome:

$ pip install "cookiecutter>=1.7.0"

Now run it against this repo:

$ cookiecutter https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django

You'll be prompted for some values. Provide them, then a Django project will be created for you.

Warning: After this point, change 'Daniel Greenfeld', 'pydanny', etc to your own information.

Answer the prompts with your own desired options. For example:

Cloning into 'cookiecutter-django'...
remote: Counting objects: 550, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (310/310), done.
remote: Total 550 (delta 283), reused 479 (delta 222)
Receiving objects: 100% (550/550), 127.66 KiB | 58 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (283/283), done.
project_name [Project Name]: Reddit Clone
project_slug [reddit_clone]: reddit
author_name [Daniel Roy Greenfeld]: Daniel Greenfeld
email [[email protected]]: [email protected]
description [Behold My Awesome Project!]: A reddit clone.
domain_name [example.com]: myreddit.com
version [0.1.0]: 0.0.1
timezone [UTC]: America/Los_Angeles
use_whitenoise [n]: n
use_celery [n]: y
use_mailhog [n]: n
use_sentry [n]: y
use_pycharm [n]: y
windows [n]: n
use_docker [n]: n
use_heroku [n]: y
use_compressor [n]: y
Select postgresql_version:
1 - 12.3
2 - 11.8
3 - 10.8
4 - 9.6
5 - 9.5
Choose from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 [1]: 1
Select js_task_runner:
1 - None
2 - Gulp
Choose from 1, 2 [1]: 1
Select cloud_provider:
1 - AWS
2 - GCP
3 - None
Choose from 1, 2, 3 [1]: 1
custom_bootstrap_compilation [n]: n
Select open_source_license:
1 - MIT
2 - BSD
3 - GPLv3
4 - Apache Software License 2.0
5 - Not open source
Choose from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 [1]: 1
keep_local_envs_in_vcs [y]: y
debug[n]: n

Enter the project and take a look around:

$ cd reddit/
$ ls

Create a git repo and push it there:

$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "first awesome commit"
$ git remote add origin [email protected]:nividata-consultancy/cookiecutter-django.git
$ git push -u origin master

Now take a look at your repo. Don't forget to carefully look at the generated README. Awesome, right?

For local development, see the following:

• Developing locally
• Developing locally using docker

• For Django 3.0
• Works with Python 3.8
• Renders Django projects with 100% starting test coverage
• Twitter Bootstrap v4 (maintained Foundation fork also available)
• 12-Factor based settings via django-environ
• Secure by default. We believe in SSL.
• Optimized development and production settings
• Registration via django-allauth
• Comes with custom user model ready to go
• Optional basic ASGI setup for Websockets
• Optional custom static build using Gulp and livereload
• Send emails via Anymail (using Mailgun by default or Amazon SES if AWS is selected cloud provider, but switchable)
• Media storage using Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage
• Docker support using docker-compose for development and production (using Traefik with LetsEncrypt support)
• Procfile for deploying to Heroku
• Instructions for deploying to PythonAnywhere
• Run tests with unittest or pytest
• Customizable PostgreSQL version
• Default integration with pre-commit for identifying simple issues before submission to code review

These features can be enabled during initial project setup.

• Serve static files from Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or Whitenoise
• Configuration for Celery and Flower (the latter in Docker setup only)
• Integration with MailHog for local email testing
• Integration with Sentry for error logging

• Only maintained 3rd party libraries are used.
• Uses PostgreSQL everywhere (9.4 - 12.3)
• Environment variables for configuration (This won't work with Apache/mod_wsgi).

You may notice that some elements of this project do not exactly match what we describe in chapter 3. The reason for that is this project, amongst other things, serves as a test bed for trying out new ideas and concepts. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, but the end result is that it won't necessarily match precisely what is described in the book I co-authored.

Need a stable release? You can find them at https://github.com/nividata-consultancy/cookiecutter-django

We accept pull requests if they're small, atomic, and make our own project development experience better.