Do we need cookiecutter?

[adrn]

👋 I'm just starting to look through some of the code here with the eventual goal of replacing the astropy-tutorials build machinery with nbpages. I'm confused about the current design. It looks like the current setup procedure for a new repository that will depend on nbpages is to use cookiecutter to copy over relevant code from nbpages and set up a directory structure to put the notebooks in. Is this really necessary? I would find it more natural to allow the user to structure their notebooks however they want, install nbpages as a package, and run, e.g.,:

nbpages build path/to/my/notebooks --output-dir=path/to/website/root

or something like that.

Could someone clarify the design decision here?