Dictionary Variables

New in Cookiecutter 1.5

Dictionary variables provide a way to define deep structured information when rendering a template.

Basic Usage

Dictionary variables are, as the name suggests, dictionaries of key-value pairs. The dictionary values can, themselves, be other dictionaries and lists - the data structure can be as deep as you need.

For example, you could provide the following dictionary variable in your cookiecutter.json:

{
    "project_slug": "new_project",
    "file_types": {
        "png": {
            "name": "Portable Network Graphic",
            "library": "libpng",
            "apps": [
                "GIMP"
            ]
        },
        "bmp": {
            "name": "Bitmap",
            "library": "libbmp",
            "apps": [
                "Paint",
                "GIMP"
            ]
        }
    }
}

The above file_types dictionary variable creates cookiecutter.file_types, which can be used like this:

{% for extension, details in cookiecutter.file_types|dictsort %}
<dl>
  <dt>Format name:</dt>
  <dd>{{ details.name }}</dd>

  <dt>Extension:</dt>
  <dd>{{ extension }}</dd>

  <dt>Applications:</dt>
  <dd>
      <ul>
      {% for app in details.apps -%}
          <li>{{ app }}</li>
      {% endfor -%}
      </ul>
  </dd>
</dl>
{% endfor %}

Cookiecutter is using Jinja2’s for expression to iterate over the items in the dictionary.