Django: How to format a DateField's date representation?

Question

I have a form with a DateField. The existing date value is formatted to render like this:

2009-10-03

How can I format that so that it look like

Answer 1

To display initial field value properly formatted, use DateInput widget. To customize validation, use input_formats keyword argument of DateField.

Why do you need both format and input_formats?

format - The format in which this field’s initial value will be displayed. See here.

input_formats - A list of formats used to attempt to convert a string to a valid datetime.date object. See here.