SAWS VS cookiecutter

I'd recommend giving https://github.com/donnemartin/saws a shot.

Personally, I have a really good set of makefiles that do all of the work (creating pdf/HTML to creating packages for PyPI and uploading). I have a few cookiecutter repos set up to simplify the boilerplate and ease new projects.

It's nice but, usually, Django folks tend to use cookiecutter (https://github.com/cookiecutter/cookiecutter) for this kind of 'templating' a project.

Have a look at cookiecutter as well - https://github.com/cookiecutter/cookiecutter

If you’re any way like me, then you must automate a task when you find yourself doing it more than once. I’ve automated the creation and configuration of a modern Python project using cookiecutter. You will need to set up your environment first. Also, nitpick uses my own take on the wemake-services configuration, you can view the repository here.

https://github.com/cookiecutter/cookiecutter and the related https://github.com/feldroy/django-crash-starter seem somewhat active and current.

Trust me, I have no desire to write a custom tool, it's always my last resort. I'm wondering if there's something in between pulling existing files from a repo and a custom tool. Something like cookiecutter but which has more fine-grained control with what it pulls down (i.e. I don't want to create an entire starter project, just something like tool pull precommit-python [optional args]).

Ideally, build your own cookiecutter.

Looks great, good job, what do you think of using something like https://github.com/cookiecutter/cookiecutter ?

I'd suggest keeping the project templates in Cookiecutter-style repos (https://github.com/cookiecutter/cookiecutter) instead of embedding them as heredocs in a shall script.