Provide ability to create new ArcGIS Pro projects from Python

[MaryGraceMcClellan]

I'm creating a script that will convert all of my MXDs to APRXs, and I find it extremely inconvenient that I can't create a new blank project from scratch form within ArcGIS Pro. This utility would make switching to ArcGIS Pro so much easier, along with the ability to create blank toolboxes. 

Edited to add: @Rhys-Donoghue posted a good workaround for this issue if anyone is interested. 

[MErikReedAugusta]

Just to be clear, my use case(s) above have nothing* to do with migrating files or file types.  The goal is to create a completely new project based on a provided template, and to be able to easily relate each of those "child" projects back to a master tracking database/project.  It's "Create new project based on a template" but with a couple extra back-end steps, essentially.

*The only place "migration" would hypothetically factor in would be in the workaround mentioned above, and migrating all the various linkages to the new project.

I'll have to do some testing.

[rhys-kdrm]

@MErikReedAugusta - I used "migration" as an example, because I have run several migrations and the workflow is the same, and the original question in this thread was about migrating from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro, however, it was not meant to cause confusion.  It is very easy to create multiple ArcGIS Pro projects via a script with different parameters.  I do it regularly.  You can read a spreadsheet, database table, or whatever to create the files.  You create a blank aprx and then open that in-memory via ArcPy and save a copy.  You need to update the home folder and other parameters in the script before saving, e.g. 

aprx = mp.ArcGISProject("...")

aprx.homeFolder = "..."

aprx.defaultGeodatabase = "..."

aprx.defaultToolbox = "..."

# ...

aprx.saveACopy("...")

del aprx

This is very easy to set up.  Send me a message on LinkedIn if you want and we can share screens and do it fairly quickly: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhys-donoghue/ 

[MErikReedAugusta]

Sounds great.  Are homeFolder and the two defaults the only things that you ever need to remember to manually set?  Or are they the only three you typically set in your workflow?

[rhys-kdrm]

That's only for the APRX itself.  For the layers, I also do stuff like adding the layers via Python from a layer file, then change the original source to the new source, i.e. you might have ten APRXs to add a buildings layer to but for the ten APRXs, the buildings could be coming from ten different feature classes (or one feature class with a different definition query for each APRX).  Alternatively, I might be downloading the data from a feature service, and in that case, I create the layer files (.lyrx) from the feature layers within the feature service, but then the data sources in the .lyrx files are wrong, so I use Python to update the data sources directly in the layer files.  This works great.