Injecting Extra Context

You can specify an extra_context dictionary that will override values from cookiecutter.json or .cookiecutterrc:

cookiecutter(
    'cookiecutter-pypackage/',
    extra_context={'project_name': 'TheGreatest'},
)

This works as command-line parameters as well:

cookiecutter --no-input cookiecutter-pypackage/ project_name=TheGreatest

You will also need to add these keys to the cookiecutter.json or .cookiecutterrc.

Example: Injecting a Timestamp

If you have cookiecutter.json that has the following keys:

{
    "timestamp": "{{ cookiecutter.timestamp }}"
}

This Python script will dynamically inject a timestamp value as the project is generated:

from cookiecutter.main import cookiecutter

from datetime import datetime

cookiecutter(
    'cookiecutter-django',
    extra_context={'timestamp': datetime.utcnow().isoformat()}
)

How this works:

The script uses datetime to get the current UTC time in ISO format.
To generate the project, cookiecutter() is called, passing the timestamp in as context via the extra_context` dict.