setuptools init to to boostrap a new pyproject.toml file

[JulienPalard]

I'm not a big cookiecutter user, and often I start my pyproject.toml a bit late in the development of my project, too late to use cookiecutter as everything BUT the pyproject.toml is created. My fault you'd tell me.

I like the pipx run flit init approach to get a pre-filled pyproject.toml file, but I use setupools more often than flit.

So I copy/paste the same pyproject.toml to every new project, I have a convenient cp ~/src/mdk/oeis/pyproject.toml . in my history, then I edit the file to fix names and things, and I'm good.

This is not beginner friendly, it just works for me.

How do you handle it?

I think setuptools could provide an init too, so we could use:

pipx run setuptools init

(pipx here is just an example, one could use pip, apt, uv, whatever, I don't care) and get a prefilled pyproject.toml file.

The init script could (or could not) try to guess things. it could be more or less intelligent at pre-filling things, I'd say let's keep this simple, we clearly don't need to reinvent cookiecutter here.