similar projects

[dcherian]

Thoughts on joining forces with https://github.com/jbusecke/cookiecutter-science-project?

[matt-long]

Good suggestion.

The workflow with cookiecutter is somewhat more involved than a template. Is there a reason to prefer the cookiecutter approach?

[dcherian]

avoids having to change a bunch of names in places. It depends on how complicated this template will be.

[mgrover1]

Taking a look at cookiecutter, I think we want something more simple... @andersy005 mentioned when I met with him yesterday that people thought that the Package Template he developed was too complicated. I think sticking with this basic approach, then mentioning resources to build on top of it (ex. adding Binder, JupyterBook, etc.) would be a good approach? Open to suggestions though.

[mgrover1]

One of the nice things about this approach is how user-friendly it is. The user can go to this repository, click on use this template and create their repository on their personal Github or through the NCAR organization. There are going to be nuances to every workflow, but I think keeping it simple is the key here (along with providing documentation on how to add more complex functionality at a later point)

[dcherian]

The user can go to this repository, click on use this template and create their repository on their personal Github or through the NCAR organization.

True.

OTOH a cookiecutter things that asks

"Do you want to set up a sphinx website (good for API docs + example notebooks) or a Jupyter Book website (good for a collection of notebooks)? [sphinx/jb]"

"Do you want to set up Binder integration so that example notebooks can be run on the cloud?"

would be a nice nudge to get people to use these things. For e.g. see the Q yesterday about setting up a github website. It's easy if you do 10 steps :P.

I don't know if the cookiecutter is this configurable though.

Another useful tool is https://cruft.github.io/cruft/ which allows you to update as the template changes, and also set up those integrations at a later time.

[mgrover1]

OTOH a cookiecutter things that asks

"Do you want to set up a sphinx website (good for API docs + example notebooks) or a Jupyter Book website (good for a collection of notebooks)? [sphinx/jb]"

"Do you want to set up Binder integration so that example notebooks can be run on the cloud?"

This would be good to add at some point... but yeah I am not sure how configurable cookiecutter is. I think it is nice having this NCAR specific repository at this point (especially in terms of the citation documentation), but adding extensibility and collaborating with cookiecutter would be good for the long term.