Create project from the Cookiecutter template.
Create a virtual environment to work in an isolated Python installation.
Install pre-commit hooks.
Keep either .gitlab-ci.yml or .github/, according to your Git hosting platform.
Update authors and description, in pyproject.toml.
Add development and installation dependencies in pyproject.toml, with permissive version constraints.
Add a LICENSE file, if applicable. This is highly recommended if the project is open source.
Add a CITATION.cff, to ease citation of your work.
Replace this README.md with a proper one. Among others, it must explain the overall context, the installation instructions, a quick start guide, and a repository structure description.

Getting started

In order to use pre-commit hooks, they need to be registered:

pre-commit install

It is a good practice to manually invoke hooks after installation, just in case:

pre-commit run --all-files

During development, install pinned dependencies in your virtual environment, including the module itself in editable mode, using:

uv sync

New dependencies can be added using uv add (or uv add --dev for development dependencies), or by manually configuring pyproject.toml and using uv lock && uv sync.