Copier has a few quirks with vcs that I just discovered by trying to test out some changes. I may have some config that I have long forgotten about somewhere deep in my dotfiles, I don't think so, but id love to be wrong and corrected, please reach out.

What Doesn't Work

I tried throwing everything at this template to make it work. I tried a bunch of flags that did not work. I tried making commits to the local repo to get rid of the dirty warning. I really wanted to test new changes locally without committing and pushing untested and potentially broken changes.

uvx copier copy ../markata-blog-starter .
uvx copier copy gh:waylonwalker/markata-blog-starter@develop .
uvx copier copy ../markata-blog-starter . -wlg --trust

What Works - --vcs-ref

Finally after trying everything to get the local copy to work, and my guess of @branch not working I found this to work. It does require me to go to the repo on my develop branch.

uvx copier copy gh:waylonwalker/markata-blog-starter --vcs-ref develop .

What Works - delete .git

Really this might be my best option to make quick changes and test them locally without going through a version control system. It is not ideal, but makes it easy to quickly iterate on. I might be renaming .git, or copying to /tmp for quick iteration.

rm -rf .git
uvx copier copy ../markata-blog-starter .

Copier I love

Copier is a great templating tool. I really love it. I use it every single day to create posts on this blog using [[ tmux-copier-templates ]]. This is the first time this quirk has got me and it had me puzzled for 45 minutes as I did not expect this behavior whatsoever.

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