Installation

Prerequisites

Python interpreter
Adjust your path
Packaging tools

Python interpreter

Install Python for your operating system. Consult the official Python documentation for details.

You can install the Python binaries from python.org. Alternatively on macOS, you can use the homebrew package manager.

# for python 3.x
$ brew install python3

Adjust your path

Ensure that your bin folder is on your path for your platform. Typically ~/.local/ for UNIX and macOS, or %APPDATA%\Python on Windows. (See the Python documentation for site.USER_BASE for full details.)

UNIX and macOS

For bash shells, add the following to your .bash_profile (adjust for other shells):

# Add ~/.local/ to PATH
export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH

Remember to load changes with source ~/.bash_profile or open a new shell session.

Windows

Ensure the directory where cookiecutter will be installed is in your environment’s Path in order to make it possible to invoke it from a command prompt. To do so, search for “Environment Variables” on your computer (on Windows 10, it is under System Properties –> Advanced) and add that directory to the Path environment variable, using the GUI to edit path segments.

Example segments should look like %APPDATA%\Python\Python3x\Scripts, where you have your version of Python instead of Python3x.

You may need to restart your command prompt session to load the environment variables.

Packaging tools

pip and setuptools now come with Python 2 >=2.7.9 or Python 3 >=3.5. See the Python Packaging Authority’s (PyPA) documentation Requirements for Installing Packages for full details.

Install cookiecutter

At the command line:

$ pip install --user cookiecutter

Or, if you do not have pip:

$ easy_install --user cookiecutter

Though, pip is recommended.

Or, if you are using conda, first add conda-forge to your channels:

$ conda config --add channels conda-forge

Once the conda-forge channel has been enabled, cookiecutter can be installed with:

$ conda install cookiecutter

Alternate installations

Homebrew (Mac OS X only):

$ brew install cookiecutter

Pipsi (Linux/OSX only):

$ pipsi install cookiecutter

Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install cookiecutter

Upgrading from 0.6.4 to 0.7.0 or greater

First, read History in detail. There are a lot of major changes. The big ones are:

Cookiecutter no longer deletes the cloned repo after generating a project.
Cloned repos are saved into ~/.cookiecutters/.
You can optionally create a ~/.cookiecutterrc config file.

Upgrade Cookiecutter either with easy_install:

$ easy_install --upgrade cookiecutter

Or with pip:

$ pip install --upgrade cookiecutter

Then you should be good to go.