How do I create a nested cookiecutter?

Question

I have a peculiar use case for a nested cookiecutter structure. My aim is to have:

• an "outer" template that can be cut straight from GitHub;
• an "inner" template that can be cut locally to generate templated subfolders inside the outer template.

It's a different use case from the multiple "parallel" cookiecutters case detailed in the docs.

This is an example of the folder structure I'm trying:

cookiecutter-for-analysis
├── cookiecutter.json
└── {{cookiecutter.repo_name}}
    ├── README.md
    ├── .gitignore
    └── project_template
        ├── cookiecutter.json
        └── {{cookiecutter.analysis_name}}
            ├── README.md
            ├── pyproject.toml
            ├── .gitignore
            ├── notebooks
            └── sql

Within the outer cookiecutter.json I define (among other things) repo_name, so that when I run

cookiecutter cookiecutter-for-analysis

a folder called repo_name is created with the outer template.

Within the inner cookiecutter.json I define (among other things) analysis_name. I would then like to run

cd repo_name
cookiecutter project_template

so that a folder called repo_name/analysis_name is created with inner template.

The issue I'm running into is that on the outer cookiecutter creation it's failing to find the inner cookiecutter attribute analysis_name:

Error message: 'collections.OrderedDict object' has no attribute 'analysis_name'.

Is there any way I can achieve this nested cookiecutter functionality?

Answer 1

I think i figured it out, and it was very simple. The "copy without render" flag in cookiecutter.json (see docs) allows me to avoid rendering the inner template:

...
"_copy_without_render": ["project_template"]
...