Development Work

For development, we recommend you setup a virtualenv and use the requirements.txt file for installing necessary modules. I have also found that I’ll need to uninstall any system wide copy of the this package before doing my development work. While I’m using a virtualenv, it still seems to find the template:

python setup.py develop

For most modifications, you’ll just be concerned with updating the structure down the python_template/templates/ directory. That is the directory structure that is used as the template basis for what we install. E.g. If you need to tweak how a default setup.py looks, you would edit python_template/templates/setup.py_tmpl

The files ending with a _tmpl extension are templates that are implemented via the cheetah template engine. Variables are substituted inside of those files via a ${variable} syntax. If a file does not have a _tmpl extension, then it will be treated as a static file and copied verbatim.

Sometimes you need to actually name a file or a directory after a variable and to do that, you end up putting plus signs around the variable name. That is why you see a +package+ directory there because we want to create a directory named after the package name you’ve picked.

If you need to introduce new variables to be prompted to the user, which you intend to use in template files, then you need to update the python_template/newmodule.py file. To prompt the person invoking the script, add your variable to the vars list whereas if you need to define a non-prompted variable, you can update the vars dictionary within the PyTemplate.pre function.

Testing

Testing can be a bit complicated with this package. While other modules you can issue a python setup.py develop this seems to have a bit of magic going on in that the new template is still only seen if you are sitting in the base directory. As a result, I’ve found the following routine to be helpful:

python setup.py sdist
P="$(pwd)/dist/python_template-$(python setup.py --version).tar.gz"
mktmpenv -i $P

Then you can try creating a new project:

paster create -t standard NewProject