This is part of the “Relearning Julia Series”…

In short, use PkgTemplates.jl.

PkgTemplates now provides the old Pkg/PkgDev.generate function.

Background

Since 0.6 several things have changed in the Julia ecosystem. One in particular is the package manager. There is a very powerful project and environment system now available to all users, which makes the system much stronger in enterprise deployments. However, the underlying system for publishing packages has not changed very much. There is still METADATA.jl.

In 0.5 one may have just run something like:
Pkg.generate("MyPackage, "MIT")
In 0.6 I believe PkgDev was introduced to help provide some additional features for publishing packages to METADATA, and the generate function was pulled out of base. Prior to PkgDev one would need to tag releases and manually submit pull requests.

Later attobot was introduced to automatically generate METADATA PRs once there was a tagged release.

PkgDev unfortunately does not seem to work on Julia 0.7 and greater, so this old functionality is broken. Therefore PkgTemplates seems to be the new preferred method of generate new projects.