Using Copier Answers to rerun templates quickly
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The copier answers file is a key component to making your templates re-runnable. Let's look at the example for my setup.py.

Date: January 8, 2022

The copier answers file is a key component to making your templates re-runnable. Let’s look at the example for my setup.py.

[code]
  ❯ tree ~/.copier-templates/setup.py
  /home/walkers/.copier-templates/setup.py
  ├── [[ _copier_conf.answers_file ]].tmpl
  ├── copier.yml
  ├── setup.cfg
  └── setup.py.tmpl

  0 directories, 4 files

Inside of my [[ _copier_conf.answers_file ]].tmpl file is this, a message not to muck around with it, and the ansers in yaml form. The first line is just a helper for the blog post.

[code]
  # ~/.copier-templates/setup.py/\[\[\ _copier_conf.answers_file\ \]\].tmpl
  # Changes here will be overwritten by Copier; NEVER EDIT MANUALLY
  [[_copier_answers|to_nice_yaml]]

Inside my copier.yml I have setup my _answers_file to point to a special file. This is because this is not a whole projet template, but one just for a single file.

[code]
  # copier.yml
  # ...
  _answers_file: .setup-py-copier-answers.yml

│ Once I change the _answers_file I was incredibly stuck

Run it
──────

I’m making a library of personal copier templates in my ~/.copier-templates directory and I am going to run it from there.

[code]
  copier copy ~/.copier-templates/setup.py

Results
───────

After rendering the template we have the following content in our .setup.setup-py-copier-answers.yml file. This will allow us to update quick if we ever change our template.

[code]
  # .setup-py-copier-answers.yml
  # Changes here will be overwritten by Copier; NEVER EDIT MANUALLY
  _src_path: /home/walkers/.copier-templates/setup.py
  author_github: waylonwalker
  author_name: Waylon Walker
  description: awesomeness
  framework: null
  keywords: null
  package_name: my-package

Update it
─────────

This is where I was most stuck, primarily becuase -a <answers_file> must come exactly after the base command copier. This felt a bit odd to and not where I expected it so it.

[code]
  copier -a .setup-py-copier-answers.yml update

Stop asking all these damn questions
────────────────────────────────────

So the defaults are now changed to our previous results, but it keeps asking for them. To stop asking we can simply add a -f flag.

[code]
  copier -fa .setup-py-copier-answers.yml update