How to create a new Spacy 3.0 project from scratch?

Question

I'm trying to create a new Spacy 3.0 project from scratch for a custom NLP pipeline. There seems to be no way of doing this. The only mechanism I can find in the documentation is to clone an existing project repository and then edit it. Is there any other way of doing this?

 >>> python -m spacy project --help
 Usage: python -m spacy project [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Command-line interface for spaCy projects and templates. You'd typically
  start by cloning a project template to a local directory and fetching its
  assets like datasets etc. See the project's project.yml for the available
  commands.

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  assets    Fetch project assets like datasets and pretrained weights.
  clone     Clone a project template from a repository.
  document  Auto-generate a README.md for a project.
  dvc       Auto-generate Data Version Control (DVC) config.
  pull      Retrieve available precomputed outputs from a remote storage.
  push      Persist outputs to a remote storage.
  run       Run a named command or workflow defined in the project.yml. 

Answer 1

All you need is a directory containing project.yml . A minimal one-command project.yml :

commands:
  - name: "demo"
    script:
      - "python --version"

Nearly everything is optional. Assets are not required:

spacy project assets

⚠ No assets specified in project.yml

Run the one defined command:

spacy project run demo

==================================== demo ====================================
Running command: /home/username/venv/spacy/bin/python --version
Python 3.7.3

See: https://spacy.io/usage/projects#project-yml