Description of the feature

The API repository template is an existing cookiecutter template aimed specifically at creating gRPC API repositories. It uses the protoc compilation helper to automatically compile the .proto files to Python files when building the Python wheel. To enable this, setuptools is used for packaging.

It would be useful to include the API template as part of this repository and deprecate the current repo, to aid discoverability and make it clear which is the most up-to-date version.

Steps for implementing the feature

Mostly, I think the current cookiecutter template can be copied into ansys-templates without much modification.

One open question is testing: Currently, the ansys-api-template repository includes tests which check that the protobuf compilation works on the resulting repository.

Since adding tests specific to a given template seems more broadly useful, maybe we should think how to solve this in general (adding some hook mechanism or common layout for tests?).

As this testing setup will take some work, we can consider merging the API template without its accompanying tests at first, and solving the testing requirement in a separate PR.

Useful links and references

No response