User Config

New in Cookiecutter 0.7

If you use Cookiecutter a lot, you’ll find it useful to have a user config file. By default Cookiecutter tries to retrieve settings from a .cookiecutterrc file in your home directory.

New in Cookiecutter 1.3

You can also specify a config file on the command line via --config-file.

cookiecutter --config-file /home/audreyr/my-custom-config.yaml cookiecutter-pypackage

Or you can set the COOKIECUTTER_CONFIG environment variable:

export COOKIECUTTER_CONFIG=/home/audreyr/my-custom-config.yaml

If you wish to stick to the built-in config and not load any user config file at all, use the CLI option --default-config instead. Preventing Cookiecutter from loading user settings is crucial for writing integration tests in an isolated environment.

Example user config:

default_context:
    full_name: "Audrey Roy"
    email: "audreyr@example.com"
    github_username: "audreyr"
cookiecutters_dir: "/home/audreyr/my-custom-cookiecutters-dir/"
replay_dir: "/home/audreyr/my-custom-replay-dir/"
abbreviations:
    pp: https://github.com/audreyfeldroy/cookiecutter-pypackage.git
    gh: https://github.com/{0}.git
    bb: https://bitbucket.org/{0}

Possible settings are:

default_context:: A list of key/value pairs that you want injected as context whenever you generate a project with Cookiecutter. These values are treated like the defaults in cookiecutter.json, upon generation of any project.
cookiecutters_dir: Directory where your cookiecutters are cloned to when you use Cookiecutter with a repo argument.
replay_dir: Directory where Cookiecutter dumps context data to, which you can fetch later on when using the replay feature.
abbreviations: A list of abbreviations for cookiecutters. Abbreviations can be simple aliases for a repo name, or can be used as a prefix, in the form abbr:suffix. Any suffix will be inserted into the expansion in place of the text {0}, using standard Python string formatting. With the above aliases, you could use the cookiecutter-pypackage template simply by saying cookiecutter pp, or cookiecutter gh:audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage. The gh (GitHub), bb (Bitbucket), and gl (Gitlab) abbreviations shown above are actually built in, and can be used without defining them yourself.