cookiecutter/cookiecutter

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

25065 stars · 2275 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Cookiecutter is a cross-platform command-line utility that generates new project directories from project templates called 'cookiecutters', which can be hosted on GitHub, local paths, or fetched from any source. It uses Jinja2 for templating, prompts users for variables interactively, works with any programming language or markup format, and can also be used programmatically as a Python library.

Use cases

• scaffold a new python package project from a template
• generate a project skeleton or boilerplate directory from a github repo
• bootstrap a new c or c++ project from a template on the command line
• create starter projects from templates without writing python code
• turn a repository into a reusable project template with prompts for custom values

When to choose

• you want to stamp out new project directories from reusable templates with interactive prompts
• you need language-agnostic scaffolding that works with any file format or markup
• you want to generate projects from github-hosted or local template directories with a single command

When to avoid

• you need a full package manager or dependency manager - cookiecutter only generates files once and does not manage the created project
• you need templates that stay synced with generated projects for later updates - output is decoupled from the template after generation
• you need an ide-integrated project wizard rather than a command-line or python api workflow

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

cli boilerplate templating developer-tools developer-tools cross-platform cli python project-scaffolding project-templates jinja2 code-generation skeleton-generator command-line

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cookiecutter/cookiecutter")