I didn’t make any progress with Zappa in the last few days, so today I tried a different approach. I researched Cookiecutter, a CLI utility that creates projects from templates. I found this flask-ask template for Cookiecutter that should be helpful.

I switched to PyCharm on Windows (because I miss GUI) and set up the project structure with the template. However, I ran into a problem installing certain dependencies. Installing cffi raises IndexError: list index out of range. Installing cryptography also failed. I saw that newer versions were already installed, so I changed the condition in requirements.txt from == to >=. This seemed to fix the issues.

I also researched Python virtual environments. Here are articles and discussions that I read:

• Pipenv & Virtual Environments
• What is the difference between venv, pyvenv, pyenv, virtualenv, virtualenvwrapper, pipenv, etc?
• Should I use pipenv or virtualenv?
• Pipenv vs virtualenv vs conda environment

From my reading, it seems that there is no clear consensus on the recommended Python virtual environment currently. venv is part of the Python standard library, but it has less features than the other options. pipenv is a higher level, third party tool. However, it’s not as reliable. virtualenvis also a third party tool, but it’s lower level than pipenv. I chose virtualenv because it’s recommended for beginners.