How do I use Django templates without the rest of Django?

Question

I want to use the Django template engine in my (Python) code, but I\'m not building a Django-based web site. How do I use it without having a settings.py file (and others)

Answer 1

Thanks for the help folks. Here is one more addition. The case where you need to use custom template tags.

Let's say you have this important template tag in the module read.py

from django import template

register = template.Library()

@register.filter(name='bracewrap')
def bracewrap(value):
    return "{" + value + "}"

This is the html template file "temp.html":

{{var|bracewrap}}

Finally, here is a Python script that will tie to all together

import django
from django.conf import settings
from django.template import Template, Context
import os

#load your tags
from django.template.loader import get_template
django.template.base.add_to_builtins("read")

# You need to configure Django a bit
settings.configure(
    TEMPLATE_DIRS=(os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__)), ),
)

#or it could be in python
#t = Template('My name is {{ my_name }}.')
c = Context({'var': 'stackoverflow.com rox'})

template = get_template("temp.html")
# Prepare context ....
print template.render(c)

The output would be

{stackoverflow.com rox}