Customising the template for your needs - Templates for Reproducible Research Projects in Economics

Once you’ve created a new repository from the template, you can begin customising it to meet your specific needs.

Renaming the project¶

Open the entire directory in VS Code.

Search for template_project in the entire codebase and replace it with new_project_name, i.e., a concise version of your project’s name (often called a “slug”).
Rename the folder src/template_project to src/new_project_name.

Running the project¶

Prior to modifying anything but the slug, confirm that the template can be executed on your system. This step is essential to ensure that any subsequent issues can be attributed to changes you make rather than the original template.

Open a terminal and navigate to the project root
```
$ cd /to/root/of/template_project
```
Install the pre-commit hooks
```
$ pixi run prek install
```
Note
Installation of pre-commit hooks is mandatory for their functionality. Repeat this step on each new machine where you work on the project.
Install the node.js dependencies for the slides
```
$ pixi run npm install
```
Run the project
```
$ pixi run pytask
```
All programs used within this project template need to be found on your path, see above (Preparing your system and getting the template and the FAQ).

If all went well, you are now ready to adapt the template to your project.

Customising the template¶

Removing auxiliary files¶

Before proceeding, delete the following items as they correspond to the meta project and not the template itself.

docs_template folder
.github folder
CHANGES_template.md file
tests/test_template.py file

Find and replace placeholders¶

Now, search for and replace the following placeholders in the entire codebase.

Placeholder	Replacement
JANE DOE	Your full name
EXAMPLE PROJECT	Your project’s name
EXAMPLE UNIVERSITY	Your university’s name
DOE2024	Your project’s citation identifier
https://github.com/OpenSourceEconomics/econ-project-templates	The GitHub repo URL corresponding to your project

Review and update project details¶

Once you are done with the replacement of placeholders, you can update the contents of the following files.

File	What to do
`README.md`	Remove the entire content and replace it with a README for your project
`pyproject.toml`	Update the project description and add any dependencies you will need
`LICENSE`	Update the year and name with the current year and your name
`.gitignore`	1. Remove the part that is not relevant to your project, that includes all lines that start with `docs_template` 2. Add any files you need to be ignored by git.

Changing tool options¶

Finally, you can update options of the included tools. The hooks (specified in .pre-commit-config.yaml) may require adjustments to align with your project’s needs. Refer to the Pre-Commit Hooks section for more details.

Next steps¶

Depending on what your needs are, move on with the section on Starting a new project from scratch or on Porting an existing project.