Posts tagged: copier

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 # [1] 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 # [2] 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 # [4] 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, ...

I’ve long used copier to create all of my posts for my blog, and it works really well for my workflow. I think of a title, call a template, and give it a title. out of the box obsidian did not seem to work this way. It seems like it wants me to right click a file tree and make a new file using the tree, this is not my jam. Here is what I came up with to replace my til template. --- date: <% tp.file.creation_date() %> templateKey: til title: <%* const originalFileName = await tp.system.prompt("Enter file name"); const toTitleCase = str => str.replace( /\w\S*/g, txt => txt.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + txt.substr(1).toLowerCase() ); const title = toTitleCase(originalFileName); tR += title + '\n'; // Add the title to the template result -%> published: true tags: - --- <%* const fileName = originalFileName.toLowerCase().replace(/\s+/g, '-'); const newFilePath = `pages/til/${fileName}`; await tp.file.move(newFilePath); -%> <% tp.file.cursor() %> - tR is a return value, and it gets placed directly into the place it is in the file - to.file.cursor() creates a tab-index point so I can tab into the content

I recently had to update my copier-gallery command to trust my own templates because some of them have shell scripts that run afterwards. Be warned that this could be a dangerous feature to run on random templates you get off the internet, but these are all mine, so if I wreck it its my own fault. copier copy --trust <template> <destination> All the the copier copy api can be found with help. ❯ copier copy --help copier copy 8.3.0 Copy from a template source to a destination. Usage: copier copy [SWITCHES] template_src destination_path Hidden-switches: -h, --help Prints this help message and quits --help-all Prints help messages of all sub-commands and quits -v, --version Prints the program's version and quits Switches: -C, --no-cleanup On error, do not delete destination if it was created by Copier. --UNSAFE, --trust Allow templates with unsafe features (Jinja extensions, migrations, tasks) -a, --answers-file VALUE:str Update using this path (relative to `destination_path`) to find the answers file -d, --data VARIABLE=VALUE:str Make VARIABLE available as VALUE when rendering the template; may be given multiple times -f, --force Same as `--defaults --overwrite`...

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 # [1] 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 [2] you can just pip install it. pip install copier cookiecutter add the extension to your template # [3] 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 # [4] 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. ...

I have added a hotkey to my copier template setup to quickly access all my templates at any time from tmux. At any point I can hit <c-b><c-b>, thats holding control and hitting bb, and I will get a popup list of all of my templates directory names. Its an fzf list, which means that I can fuzzy search through it for the template I want, or arrow key to the one I want if I am feeling insane. I even setup it up so that the preview is a list of the files that come with the template in tree view. bind-key c-b popup -E -w 80% -d '#{pane_current_path}' "\ pipx run copier copy ~/.copier-templates/`ls ~/.copier-templates |\ fzf --header $(pwd) --preview='tree ~/.copier-templates/{} |\ lolcat'` . \ " I’ve had this on my systems for a few weeks now and I am constantly using it for my tils [1], blogs [2], and my .envrc file that goes into all of my projects to make sure that I have a virtual environment [3] installed and running any time I open it. [4] References: [1]: https://waylonwalker.com/til/ [2]: https://waylonwalker.com/archive/ [3]: /virtual-environment/ [4]: https://images.waylonwalker.com/copier-templates-tmux-popup.png

Copier allows you to run post render tasks, just like cookiecutter. These are defined as a list of tasks in your copier.yml. They are simply shell commands to run. The example I have below runs an update-gratitude bash script after the copier template has been rendered. # copier.yml num: 128 _answers_file: .gratitude-copier-answers.yml _tasks: - "update-gratitude" I have put the script in ~/.local/bin so that I know it’s always on my $PATH. It will reach back into the copier.yml and update the default number. #!/bin/bash # ~/.local/bin/update-gratitude current=`awk '{print $2}' ~/.copier-templates/gratitude/copier.yml | head -n 1` new=`expr $current + 1` echo $current echo $new sed -i "s/$current/$new/g" ~/.copier-templates/gratitude/copier.yml

The copier answers file is a key component to making your templates re-runnable. Let’s look at the example for my setup.py. ❯ 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. # ~/.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. # copier.yml # ... _answers_file: .setup-py-copier-answers.yml Once I change the _answers_file I was incredibly stuck Run it # [1] I’m making a library of personal copier templates in my ~/.copier-templates directory and I am going to run it from there. copier copy ~/.copier-templates/setup.py Results # [2] After rendering the template we have the followi...

I was completely stuck for awhile. copier was not replacing my template variables. I found out that adding all these _endops fixed it. Now It will support all of these types of variable wrappers # copier.yml _templates_suffix: .jinja _envops: block_end_string: "%}" block_start_string: "{%" comment_end_string: "#}" comment_start_string: "{#" keep_trailing_newline: true variable_end_string: "}}" variable_start_string: "{{" !RTFM: Later I read the docs and realized that copier defaults to using [[ and ]] for its templates unlike other tools like cookiecutter.

I’ve been looking for a templating tool for awhile that works well with single files. My go to templating tool cookiecutter does not work for single files, it needs to put files into a directory underneath of it. template variables # [1] By default copier uses double square brackets for its variables. variables in files, directory_names, or file_names will be substituted for their value once you render them. # hello-py/hello.py.tmpl print('hello-[[name]]') note! by default copier will not inject variables into your template-strings unless you use a .tmpl suffix. Before running copier we need to tell copier what variables to ask for, we do this with a copier.yml file. # copier.yml name: default: my_name type: str help: What is your name installing copier # [2] I prefer to install cli tools that I need globally with pipx, this always gives me access to the tool without worrying about dependency conflicts, bloating my system site-packages, or managing a separate virtual environment [3] for it myself. pipx install copier running copier # [4] When running copier copy we pass in the directory of the template, and the directory that we want to render the template into. cop...