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}

Answer 2

Google AppEngine uses the Django templating engine, have you taken a look at how they do it? You could possibly just use that.

Answer 3

Don't. Use StringTemplate instead--there is no reason to consider any other template engine once you know about it.

Answer 4

According to the Jinja documentation, Python 3 support is still experimental. So if you are on Python 3 and performance is not an issue, you can use django's built in template engine.

Django 1.8 introduced support for multiple template engines which requires a change to the way templates are initialized. You have to explicitly configure settings.DEBUG which is used by the default template engine provided by django. Here's the code to use templates without using the rest of django.

from django.template import Template, Context
from django.template.engine import Engine

from django.conf import settings
settings.configure(DEBUG=False)

template_string = "Hello {{ name }}"
template = Template(template_string, engine=Engine())
context = Context({"name": "world"})
output = template.render(context) #"hello world"

Answer 5

Found this:

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/3339

Answer 6

Jinja2 syntax is pretty much the same as Django's with very few differences, and you get a much more powerfull template engine, which also compiles your template to bytecode (FAST!).

I use it for templating, including in Django itself, and it is very good. You can also easily write extensions if some feature you want is missing.

Here is some demonstration of the code generation:

>>> import jinja2
>>> print jinja2.Environment().compile('{% for row in data %}{{ row.name | upper }}{% endfor %}', raw=True) 
from __future__ import division
from jinja2.runtime import LoopContext, Context, TemplateReference, Macro, Markup, TemplateRuntimeError, missing, concat, escape, markup_join, unicode_join
name = None

def root(context, environment=environment):
    l_data = context.resolve('data')
    t_1 = environment.filters['upper']
    if 0: yield None
    for l_row in l_data:
        if 0: yield None
        yield unicode(t_1(environment.getattr(l_row, 'name')))

blocks = {}
debug_info = '1=9'