Can I automatically create a label on a github repo?

Our organisation stores code on github and there are certain ways-of-working that we want new repos created by our team to adhere to (e.g. there is a default set of workflows at .github/workflows that each repo should have, a basic .gitignore, linter config files in .github, etc..). Hence we have built repo templates that people can instantiate using a tool called cookiecutter. Its working really well. Note though that cookiecutter only automates the creation of content, it doesn't actually create the git repo (i.e. it doesn't run git init) and it doesn't create anything on github. Hence, the workflow for someone to use one of our templates is:

cookiecutter --output-dir new-repo-name https://github.com/our-org/our-template-repo
cd new-repo-name
git init
gh repo create new-repo-name --private --source=. --remote=upstream
git add .
git push

Hopefully you get the idea.

We then had an idea that we would like to be able to track all the github repos that get created from our templates. We thought a nice way of doing that would be to ensure that each of those repos had a certain label on them.

Hence I'd like to be able to automatically create labels on such newly created repos. Does anyone know a way of doing that? (I was hoping there was perhaps a way of achieving it by putting a certain file into the .github directory, but alas it seems there is no such thing.)

The only labels that come to my mind are the classic GitHub Labels for issues and pull requests. You can also create them with the GitHub CLI. In your case you could add something like gh label create template --description "Created with template xyz" --color 348AA7 to your script. Let me know if this was helpful.