Copier Slugify | Python Templating | Using Cookiecutter

It's no secret that I love automation, and lately my templating framework of choice has been copier. One hiccup I recently ran into was having spaces in my templated directory names. This makes it harder to run commands against as you need to escape them, and if they end up in a url you end up with ugly %20 all over.

Cookiecutter has the solution

Yes the solution comes from a competing templating framework.

I install copier with pipx, so I need to inject cookiecutter in to my copier environment to use the slugify filter.

        
pipx inject copier cookiecutter

If you are using a normal virtual environment you can just pip install it.

        
pip install copier cookiecutter

add the extension to your template

copier.yml

Now to enable the extension you need to declare it in your copier.yml file in your template.

        
_jinja_extensions:
    - cookiecutter.extensions.SlugifyExtension

Use it | slugify

use-it

Now to use it, anywhere that you want to slugify a variable, you just pipe it into slugify.

        
❯ tree .
.
├── copier.yml
├── README.md
└── {{ site_name|slugify }}
    └── markata.toml.jinja

1 directory, 3 files

Here is a slimmed down version of what the copier.yml looks like.

        
site_name:
  type: str
  help: What is the name of your site, this shows in seo description and the site title.
  default: Din Djarin

_jinja_extensions:
    - cookiecutter.extensions.SlugifyExtension

Results

Running the template looks a bit like this.

---

straight from their docs

The next section is straight from the cookiecutter docs

Slugify extension

The cookiecutter.extensions.SlugifyExtension extension provides a slugify filter in templates that converts string into its dashed ("slugified") version:

        
{% "It's a random version" | slugify %}

Would output:

        
it-s-a-random-version

It is different from a mere replace of spaces since it also treats some special characters differently such as ' in the example above. The function accepts all arguments that can be passed to the slugify function of python-slugify_. For example to change the output from it-s-a-random-version to it_s_a_random_version, the separator parameter would be passed: slugify(separator='_').