Should hatch provide the ability to customize how projects are created?

[julie777]

Currently the documentation has a section "Project templates", but it consists of very few, and select options that can be put in the hatch config file. I do appreciate the ones that are there. I would hate to have to choose the license by answering a question for every project I create.

Some examples of how I would like to modify the default behavior:

• provide a set of dev packages that I want in all my project (ex. pytest, pytest-cov, flake8, autopep8, etc.)
• provide a set of package dependencies that I want for different kinds of projects. This is similar to --cli but something that could be easily modified by the user with config files, instead of writing a plugin
• provide a set of basic files for the doc directory so all my projects have the same basic doc structure

I hope there will be some interest in discussing this.

[ofek]

writing a plugin

This is the way, though I haven't documented the project template plugin API because I'm not yet satisfied with it. I will keep this discussion open until the API is finalized.

Thanks!

[bastienqb]

Is there any plan to include cookiecutter for the template generation or do you prefer to stick with file defined as text in the python code?

[ofek]

The latter, for plugins

[rod7760]

Out of curiosity, what do you dislike about the API?

[ofek]

It's kind of hacky and I don't envision it scaling very well currently.

[patrickarmengol]

I'm curious about where templating is headed. @ofek noted that they're planning for templates to be implemented via plugins.

1. Does this mean that each template will have to be its own plugin? Or does it mean that each custom template will be defined via the user confg file by choosing which plugins to enable (tests, ci, src-layout)?
2. Why is --cli a cli command option instead of a template plugin?
3. The new settings for lint tools and env seem to be hardcoded in the default template instead of via a plugin choice. Is this intentional? I use ruff, but prefer pyright to mypy and blue to black. If 'lint' was implemented as a plugin, would I still have to do any customization manually by editing pyproject.toml after project generation or could I configure the lint plugin?
4. How would I update existing projects after modifying the template? (similar to copier or cruft)

Sorry for the wall of questions.

[schlich]

I think that --cli being under 'feature flag' means its experimental

[ofek]

Sorry for the confusion but no that means there are CLI flags that activate features. Do you have a recommendation for how to improve the verbiage to reduce confusion?

[quattro]

Any updates on this? It would be great to have a means to generate a skeleton for mkdocs/sphinx, similar to what pyscaffold does