I'm trying to run cookiecutter against a local, version controlled, repository and the --checkout BRANCH option seems to largely be ignored. Similarly if I invoke cookiecutter with checkout="BRANCH". I suspect it is not picking up that the cookiecutter resides within a repository as I am passing in a local path for the repository argument. As a consequence I have tried a number of variants of the file:///...folder both with forward and backward slashes and double/triple leading slashes, My results are as follows :

e:\Python>cookiecutter file:///e:/python/biscuits --checkout python
A valid repository for "file:///e:/python/biscuits" could not be found in the following locations:
file:///e:/python/biscuits

e:\Python>cookiecutter file:///e:\python\biscuits --checkout python
A valid repository for "file:///e:\python\biscuits" could not be found in the following locations:
file:///e:\python\biscuits

e:\Python>cookiecutter file:///e:\\python\\biscuits --checkout python
A valid repository for "file:///e:\\python\\biscuits" could not be found in the following locations:
file:///e:\\python\\biscuits

e:\Python>cookiecutter file://e:/python/biscuits --checkout python
A valid repository for "file://e:/python/biscuits" could not be found in the following locations:
file://e:/python/biscuits

e:\Python>cookiecutter file://e:\python\biscuits --checkout python
A valid repository for "file://e:\python\biscuits" could not be found in the following locations:
file://e:\python\biscuits

e:\Python>cookiecutter file://e:\\python\\biscuits --checkout python
A valid repository for "file:///e:/python/biscuits" could not be found in the following locations:
file:///e:/python/biscuits

I am also uncertain of where the .git in .../folder.git originates from ? If I create a normal repository the result is .../folder/.git and if I push this into a "bare" repository there isn't a .git folder. Is this some naming convention that you use to identify folders under version control e.g. ../folder.git, ../folder.svn, .../folder.cvs etc. or is there some other format for a git folder that I'm unaware of ? Renaming my repository as ../folder.git has no effect either. My guess is that this is some form of convention that you use and that the documentation does not reflect this or you are actually pointing to a repository hosted on some form of git server, though which one is not clear (I know gitlab/github append .git to their urls for instance but I do not know how one hosts a repository under such a path ending otherwise; If you do this I'd be keen to know how)

After a quick skim through cookiecutter/repository.py it seems as though cookiecutter only tests for the presence of a local folder and does not inspect it for any versioning mechanism. If I follow it correctly the code uses REPO_REGEX to distinguish git|svn|cvs+file://some/path, under version control, from /some/path, without version control. I tested REPO_REGEX does match my use cases above yet the "repository" code that should execute in preference to the "folder" does not and I fall through to the raised exception at the end of determine_repo_dir. It seems that cookiecutter should duplicate local paths, that are version controlled repositories, to be duplicated into the users' .cookiecutter folder in the same manner that a remote repository might be checked out yet for me this is failing.

*aside: * I'll fire up a development environment for this when I have time again but for today I'm out of moonlight.