Introduction

I am a really great fan of Markdown. This is mainly because it is one of the few Markup languages that produces clear, neat source files during the writing process as well as structured, good-looking websites after rendering. So it is not surprising that I have been using Markdown for project documentation for quite a while now. Normally project documentations tend to consist of more then one document. So there is this static website generator called mkdocs that generates a complete website out of multiple Markdown documents arranged in a directory structure. It can be enhanced by a number of plugins that make it much easier to create a layout of your liking. Gradually I developed a certain project structure with always the same Plugins installed and it showed that I had to do the same steps over and over again for each new project. I figured it would be great to use some kind of template system. Luckily I heard about Cookiecutter which is a command-line utility that creates projects from so-called "cookie cutters" which are basically project templates. Here I will show how to create a mkdocs template with Cookiecutter that you can use everytime you create a new project documentation. We will also use the still new pipenv virtual environment and package manager to automatically install the needed Markdown plugins.

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