This template is deprecated in favor of OpenAstronomy packaging guide, which reflects more up-to-date Python packaging techniques. In the future, this template will be replaced by a guide built from the OA guide specific to Astropy, but in the meantime, if you are starting a new project you may wish to start from the OA guide.
cookiecutter branch: 
This is a package template provided by the Astropy project.
Using this template, packages can make use of the setup, installation, and documentation
infrastructure developed for the astropy core and affiliated packages.
For more information, see:
- The documentation for this package template itself
- Astropy documentation about this template
- The Affiliated Packages section of the Astropy web site
- This template's Github code repository
This package template makes use of the cookiecutter package to make it easier to get started with the package template. You will need to install cookiecutter which can be done easily using conda or pip:
conda install -c conda-forge cookiecutter gitpython pip install cookiecutter gitpython
Once you have cookiecutter installed you can run:
cookiecutter gh:astropy/package-template
Which will ask you a series of questions to configure your package.
The master git branch of this repository contains a version of the
template populated with placeholders. This allows the package template to be
used directly without using cookiecutter, although a number of
manual steps
are required. For this reason the cookiecutter approach is recommended.
If you want to modify this package template to add or fix things, the folder that
the user ends up with is {{ cookiecutter.package_name }} in this
repository. Everything in the repository that is not in this folder is not part
of the template that the user will have rendered.
For further information on writing templates for cookiecutter see the cookiecutter docs.