shutil.copytree without files

You can do that by providing a "ignore" function

def ig_f(dir, files):
    return [f for f in files if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(dir, f))]

shutil.copytree(SRC, DES, ignore=ig_f)

Basically, when you call copytree, it will recursively go to each child folder and provide a list of files in that folder to the ignore function to check if those files are suitable based on a pattern. The ignored files will be returned as a list in the end of the function and then, copytree will only copy items excluding from that list (which in your case, contains all the files in the current folder)

You should consider using os.walk.

Here is an example for os.walk. This way you could list all the directories and then create them with os.mkdir.

Here's an implementation of @Oz123's solution which is based on os.walk():

import os

def create_empty_dirtree(srcdir, dstdir, onerror=None):
    srcdir = os.path.abspath(srcdir)
    srcdir_prefix = len(srcdir) + len(os.path.sep)
    os.makedirs(dstdir)
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(srcdir, onerror=onerror):
        for dirname in dirs:
            dirpath = os.path.join(dstdir, root[srcdir_prefix:], dirname)
            try:
                os.mkdir(dirpath)
            except OSError as e:
                if onerror is not None:
                    onerror(e)