Welcome to Astropy Package Template’s documentation!

The Astropy package template is designed to help quickly create new Python packages within the Astropy ecosystem. This package is similar to the layout of the main Astropy core library, and reuses much of the helper code used to organize Astropy and many Astropy affiliated packages.

This documentation will guide you through getting started with the package template and updating your package when the template is updated.

If you have any issues using the package template, please open an issue in the package-template issue tracker.

Getting Started

The Astropy Package template uses the Cookiecutter project to make it easier to customise the template for your package. To use the package template you need cookiecutter installed. Depending on how you have Python installed these packages can be obtained through either pip or conda:

conda install -c conda-forge cookiecutter gitpython

or:

pip install cookiecutter gitpython

Cookiecutter works by taking a template (in this case the Astropy Package Template) and asking you a series of questions to create a set of files and folders where your answers to the questions are pre-filled into the correct places. The package template uses this to allow you to specify things like your project’s name as well as choose what parts and features of the template you want to use.

To start a package with the package template run:

cookiecutter gh:astropy/package-template

This will prompt you with a series of questions about your project. See the Options during Setup page for more details on the various options.

If this is the first time you are rendering a template, you may want to take a moment to examine the example files that have been included in the package. These are examples of a pure-python module, a test script, a Cython module, and a sub-package, respectively. These are provided as examples of a standard way to lay these out. Once you understand these or if you do not need them, you’ll want to delete them and later replace with your own as needed.

For further customization of your package including setting up testing and documentation, read the Next Steps for further information.

Removal of Python 2 support

This package template now supports Python 3.6+ versions only. However we will provide critical bug fixes to the cookiecutter-2.x branch until the end of 2019. We also provide a Python 2 compatible rendered versions of the template in the master-py2 branch.

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