Revise Django / Wagtail project template approach

Background

Spin off from #318, #278

We have templates for Django and Wagtail projects, but the scaffolding is largely the same, which means we have two places to update code and configs as we refine our stack. We don't always do this, e.g., the Wagtail template is still using Django Compressor instead of WebPack. Moreover, boilerplate code means that our templates must be updated to account for breaking changes when Django / Wagtail have major version releases, and we have not found an easy way to keep other dependencies up to date. Finally, using our cookiecutters isn't very ergonomic, because you have to clone and update this repository, and darn it, I can never find them on first try, even though I'm the one that originally put them in the docker/templates/ directory.

Proposal

I propose three things:

Relocate DataMade's cookiecutters to their own GitHub repositories so they can be used directly from GitHub, no updates required: https://cookiecutter.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage.html#works-directly-with-git-and-hg-mercurial-repos-too
Revise the Django and Wagtail templates to do away with boilerplate Python, relying instead on the startproject command that comes out of the box with Django and is extended by Wagtail
Extending the work from https://github.com/datamade/how-to/issues/318#issuecomment-1462947524, create a unified Django / Wagtail cookiecutter with a post_gen_project_hook that:
Installs Python and JavaScript dependencies, and pins versions
- Runsstartproject
- Copies a default settings file from the template to the generated project

Deliverables

I will rehome the vanilla JavaScript cookiecutter to its own repositories. I will then create a combined Django / Wagtail cookiecutter following the proposal above. All other cookiecutters will be retired.

Timeline

I expect this to take a day or two.

datamade / how-to