Consistent folder structures with Cookiecutter

Kickstart your projects with Cookiecutter

Cookiecutter enables creating templated folder structures and files to kickstart your projects. At Deltares, we created such a template.

Using the same project template in an organization has the following advantages:

No time wasted thinking about file orgization
Consistency between work of colleagues and projects
Scripts more easily transferrable between projects
Less time wasted searching for files

The iMOD Gitlab group contains multiple applications of the Deltares Project template.

Install

To install Cookiecutter, run the following command:

pip install cookiecutter

Kickstart project

Then to create a new project:

cookiecutter gl:deltares/imod/cookiecutter-reproducible-project

This will create the following folder and file structure:

.
├── AUTHORS.md
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── bin                 <- Your compiled model code can be stored here (not tracked by git)
├── config              <- Configuration files, e.g., for doxygen or for your model if needed
├── data                
│   ├── 1-external      <- Data external to the project.
│   ├── 2-interim       <- Intermediate data that has been altered.
│   ├── 3-input         <- The processed data sets, ready for modeling.
│   ├── 4-output        <- Data dump from the model.
│   └── 5-visualization <- Post-processed data, ready for visualisation.
├── docs                <- Documentation, e.g., doxygen or scientific papers (not tracked by git)
├── notebooks           <- Jupyter notebooks
├── reports             <- For a manuscript source, e.g., LaTeX, Markdown, etc., or any project reports
│   └── figures         <- Figures for the manuscript or reports
└── src                 <- Source code for this project
    ├── 0-setup         <- Install necessary software, dependencies, pull other git projects, etc.
    ├── 1-prepare       <- Scripts and programs to process data, from 1-external to 2-interim.
    ├── 2-build         <- Scripts to create model specific input from 2-interim to 3-input. 
    ├── 3-model         <- Scripts to run model and convert or compress model results, from 3-input to 4-output.
    ├── 4-analyze       <- Scripts to post-process model results, from 4-output to 5-visualization.
    └── 5-visualize     <- Scripts for visualisation of your results, from 5-visualization to ./report/figures.