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

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) and having to set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable?
If I run the following code:
>>> import django.template
>>> from django.template import Template, Context
>>> t = Template('My name is {{ my_name }}.')
I get:
ImportError: Settings cannot be imported, because environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is undefined.

The solution is simple. It's actually well documented, but not too easy to find. (I had to dig around -- it didn't come up when I tried a few different Google searches.)
The following code works:
>>> from django.template import Template, Context
>>> from django.conf import settings
>>> settings.configure()
>>> t = Template('My name is {{ my_name }}.')
>>> c = Context({'my_name': 'Daryl Spitzer'})
>>> t.render(c)
u'My name is Daryl Spitzer.'
See the Django documentation (linked above) for a description of some of the settings you may want to define (as keyword arguments to configure).

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'

Any particular reason you want to use Django's templates? Both Jinja and Genshi are, in my opinion, superior.
If you really want to, then see the Django documentation on settings.py. Especially the section "Using settings without setting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE". Use something like this:
from django.conf import settings
settings.configure (FOO='bar') # Your settings go here

An addition to what other wrote, if you want to use Django Template on Django > 1.7, you must give your settings.configure(...) call the TEMPLATES variable and call django.setup() like this :
from django.conf import settings
settings.configure(TEMPLATES=[
{
'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
'DIRS': ['.'], # if you want the templates from a file
'APP_DIRS': False, # we have no apps
},
])
import django
django.setup()
Then you can load your template like normally, from a string :
from django import template
t = template.Template('My name is {{ name }}.')
c = template.Context({'name': 'Rob'})
t.render(c)
And if you wrote the DIRS variable in the .configure, from the disk :
from django.template.loader import get_template
t = get_template('a.html')
t.render({'name': 5})
Django Error: No DjangoTemplates backend is configured
http://django.readthedocs.io/en/latest/releases/1.7.html#standalone-scripts

I would also recommend jinja2. There is a nice article on django vs. jinja2 that gives some in-detail information on why you should prefere the later.

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"

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}

I would say Jinja as well. It is definitely more powerful than Django Templating Engine and it is stand alone.
If this was an external plug to an existing Django application, you could create a custom command and use the templating engine within your projects environment. Like this;
manage.py generatereports --format=html
But I don't think it is worth just using the Django Templating Engine instead of Jinja.

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

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

I echo the above statements. Jinja 2 is a pretty good superset of Django templates for general use. I think they're working on making the Django templates a little less coupled to the settings.py, but Jinja should do well for you.

While running the manage.py shell:
>>> from django import template
>>> t = template.Template('My name is {{ me }}.')
>>> c = template.Context({'me': 'ShuJi'})
>>> t.render(c)

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

Related

How to get a url map in django? [duplicate]

Is there a way to get the complete django url configuration?
For example Django's debugging 404 page does not show included url configs, so this is not the complete configuration.
Django extensions provides a utility to do this as a manage.py command.
pip install django-extensions
Then add django_extensions to your INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py. then from the console just type the following
python manage.py show_urls
Django is Python, so introspection is your friend.
In the shell, import urls. By looping through urls.urlpatterns, and drilling down through as many layers of included url configurations as possible, you can build the complete url configuration.
import urls
urls.urlpatterns
The list urls.urlpatterns contains RegexURLPattern and RegexURLResolver objects.
For a RegexURLPattern object p you can display the regular expression with
p.regex.pattern
For a RegexURLResolver object q, which represents an included url configuration, you can display the first part of the regular expression with
q.regex.pattern
Then use
q.url_patterns
which will return a further list of RegexURLResolver and RegexURLPattern objects.
At the risk of adding a "me too" answer, I am posting a modified version of the above submitted script that gives you a view listing all the URLs in the project, somewhat prettified and sorted alphabetically, and the views that they call. More of a developer tool than a production page.
def all_urls_view(request):
from your_site.urls import urlpatterns #this import should be inside the function to avoid an import loop
nice_urls = get_urls(urlpatterns) #build the list of urls recursively and then sort it alphabetically
return render(request, "yourapp/links.html", {"links":nice_urls})
def get_urls(raw_urls, nice_urls=[], urlbase=''):
'''Recursively builds a list of all the urls in the current project and the name of their associated view'''
from operator import itemgetter
for entry in raw_urls:
fullurl = (urlbase + entry.regex.pattern).replace('^','')
if entry.callback: #if it points to a view
viewname = entry.callback.func_name
nice_urls.append({"pattern": fullurl,
"location": viewname})
else: #if it points to another urlconf, recur!
get_urls(entry.url_patterns, nice_urls, fullurl)
nice_urls = sorted(nice_urls, key=itemgetter('pattern')) #sort alphabetically
return nice_urls
and the template:
<ul>
{% for link in links %}
<li>
{{link.pattern}} ----- {{link.location}}
</li>
{% endfor%}
</ul>
If you wanted to get real fancy you could render the list with input boxes for any of the regexes that take variables to pass to the view (again as a developer tool rather than production page).
This question is a bit old, but I ran into the same problem and I thought I would discuss my solution. A given Django project obviously needs a means of knowing about all its URLs and needs to be able to do a couple things:
map from a url -> view
map from a named url -> url (then 1 is used to get the view)
map from a view name -> url (then 1 is used to get the view)
Django accomplishes this mostly through an object called a RegexURLResolver.
RegexURLResolver.resolve (map from a url -> view)
RegexURLResolver.reverse
You can get your hands on one of these objects the following way:
from my_proj import urls
from django.core.urlresolvers import get_resolver
resolver = get_resolver(urls)
Then, you can simply print out your urls the following way:
for view, regexes in resolver.reverse_dict.iteritems():
print "%s: %s" % (view, regexes)
That said, Alasdair's solution is perfectly fine and has some advantages, as it prints out some what more nicely than this method. But knowing about and getting your hands on a RegexURLResolver object is something nice to know about, especially if you are interested in Django internals.
The easiest way to get a complete list of registered URLs is to install contrib.admindocs then check the "Views" section. Very easy to set up, and also gives you fully browsable docs on all of your template tags, models, etc.
I have submitted a package (django-showurls) that adds this functionality to any Django project, it's a simple new management command that integrates well with manage.py:
$ python manage.py showurls
^admin/
^$
^login/$
^logout/$
.. etc ..
You can install it through pip:
pip install django-showurls
And then add it to your installed apps in your Django project settings.py file:
INSTALLED_APPS = [
..
'django_showurls',
..
]
And you're ready to go.
More info here -
https://github.com/Niklas9/django-showurls
If you want a list of all the urls in your project, first you need to install django-extensions
You can simply install using command.
pip install django-extensions
For more information related to package goto django-extensions
After that, add django_extensions in INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py file like this:
INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
'django_extensions',
...
)
urls.py example:
from django.urls import path, include
from . import views
from . import health_views
urlpatterns = [
path('get_url_info', views.get_url_func),
path('health', health_views.service_health_check),
path('service-session/status', views.service_session_status)
]
And then, run any of the command in your terminal
python manage.py show_urls
or
./manage.py show_urls
Sample output example based on config urls.py:
/get_url_info django_app.views.get_url_func
/health django_app.health_views.service_health_check
/service-session/status django_app.views.service_session_status
For more information you can check the documentation.
Are you looking for the urls evaluated or not evaluated as shown in the DEBUG mode? For evaluated, django.contrib.sitemaps can help you there, otherwise it might involve some reverse engineering with Django's code.
When I tried the other answers here, I got this error:
django.core.exceptions.AppRegistryNotReady: Apps aren't loaded yet.
It looks like the problem comes from using django.contrib.admin.autodiscover() in my urls.py, so I can either comment that out, or load Django properly before dumping the URL's. Of course if I want to see the admin URL's in the mapping, I can't comment them out.
The way I found was to create a custom management command that dumps the urls.
# install this file in mysite/myapp/management/commands/urldump.py
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
from kive import urls
class Command(BaseCommand):
help = "Dumps all URL's."
def handle(self, *args, **options):
self.show_urls(urls.urlpatterns)
def show_urls(self, urllist, depth=0):
for entry in urllist:
print ' '.join((" " * depth, entry.regex.pattern,
entry.callback and entry.callback.__module__ or '',
entry.callback and entry.callback.func_name or ''))
if hasattr(entry, 'url_patterns'):
self.show_urls(entry.url_patterns, depth + 1)
If you are running Django in debug mode (have DEBUG = True in your settings) and then type a non-existent URL you will get an error page listing the complete URL configuration.

Excluding a Django app from being localized using a middleware

I need to localize a django project, but keep one of the applications (the blog) English only.
I wrote this middleware in order to achieve this:
from django.conf import settings
from django.core.urlresolvers import resolve
class DelocalizeMiddleware:
def process_request(self, request):
current_app_name = __name__.split('.')[-2]
match = resolve(request.path)
if match.app_name == current_app_name:
request.LANGUAGE_CODE = settings.LANGUAGE_CODE
Problem is, it assumes the middleware lies directly in the application module (e.g. blog/middleware.py) for retrieving the app name. Other projects might have the middleware in blog/middleware/delocalize.py or something else altogether.
What's the best way to retrieve the name of the currently running app?
You can use Django's resolve function to get the current app name.
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#resolve

Defining Constants in Django

I want to have some constants in a Django Projects. For example, let's say a constant called MIN_TIME_TEST.
I would like to be able to access this constant in two places: from within my Python code, and from within any Templates.
What's the best way to go about doing this?
EDIT:
To clarify, I know about Template Context Processors and about just putting things in settings.py or some other file and just importing.
My question is, how do I combine the two approaches without violating the "Don't Repeat Yourself" rule? Based on the answers so far, here's my approach:
I'd like to create a file called global_constants.py, which will have a list of constants (things like MIN_TIME_TEST = 5). I can import this file into any module to get the constants.
But now, I want to create the context processor which returns all of these constants. How can I go about doing this automatically, without having to list them again in a dictionary, like in John Mee's answer?
Both Luper and Vladimir are correct imho but you'll need both in order to complete your requirements.
Although, the constants don't need to be in the settings.py, you could put them anywhere and import them from that place into your view/model/module code. I sometimes put them into the __init__.py if I don't care to have them to be considered globally relevant.
a context processor like this will ensure that selected variables are globally in the template scope
def settings(request):
"""
Put selected settings variables into the default template context
"""
from django.conf import settings
return {
'DOMAIN': settings.DOMAIN,
'GOOGLEMAPS_API_KEY': settings.GOOGLEMAPS_API_KEY,
}
But this might be overkill if you're new to django; perhaps you're just asking how to put variables into the template scope...?
from django.conf import settings
...
# do stuff with settings.MIN_TIME_TEST as you wish
render_to_response("the_template.html", {
"MIN_TIME_TEST": settings.MIN_TIME_TEST
}, context_instance=RequestContext(request)
To build on other people's answers, here's a simple way you'd implement this:
In your settings file:
GLOBAL_SETTINGS = {
'MIN_TIME_TEST': 'blah',
'RANDOM_GLOBAL_VAR': 'blah',
}
Then, building off of John Mee's context processor:
def settings(request):
"""
Put selected settings variables into the default template context
"""
from django.conf import settings
return settings.GLOBAL_SETTINGS
This will resolve the DRY issue.
Or, if you only plan to use the global settings occasionally and want to call them from within the view:
def view_func(request):
from django.conf import settings
# function code here
ctx = {} #context variables here
ctx.update(settings.GLOBAL_SETTINGS)
# whatever output you want here
Consider putting it into settings.py of your application. Of course, in order to use it in template you will need to make it available to template as any other usual variable.
Use context processors to have your constants available in all templates (settings.py is a nice place to define them as Vladimir said).
Context processors are better suited at handling more dynamic object data--they're defined as a mapping in the documentation and in many of the posts here they're being modified or passed around to views--it doesn't make sense that a template may lose access to global information because, for example, your forgot to use a specialized context processor in the view. The data is global by definition & that couples the view to the template.
A better way is to define a custom template tag. This way:
templates aren't relying on views to have global information passed into them
it's DRY-er: the app defining the global settings can be exported to many projects, eliminating common code across projects
templates decide whether they have access to the global information, not the view functions
In the example below I deal with your problem--loading in this MIN_TIME_TEST variable--and a problem I commonly face, loading in URLs that change when my environment changes.
I have 4 environments--2 dev and 2 production:
Dev: django-web server, url: localhost:8000
Dev: apache web server: url: sandbox.com -> resolves to 127.0.0.1
Prod sandbox server, url: sandbox.domain.com
Prod server: url: domain.com
I do this on all my projects & keep all the urls in a file, global_settings.py so it's accessible from code. I define a custom template tag {% site_url %} that can be (optionally) loaded into any template
I create an app called global_settings, and make sure it's included in my settings.INSTALLED_APPS tuple.
Django compiles templated text into nodes with a render() method that tells how the data should be displayed--I created an object that renders data by returnning values in my global_settings.py based on the name passed in.
It looks like this:
from django import template
import global_settings
class GlobalSettingNode(template.Node):
def __init__(self, settingname):
self.settingname = settingname;
def render(self, context):
if hasattr(global_settings, self.settingname):
return getattr(global_settings, self.settingname)
else:
raise template.TemplateSyntaxError('%s tag does not exist' % self.settingname)
Now, in global_settings.py I register a couple tags: site_url for my example and min_test_time for your example. This way, when {% min_time_test %} is invoked from a template, it'll call get_min_time_test which resolves to load in the value=5. In my example, {% site_url %} will do a name-based lookup so that I can keep all 4 URLs defined at once and choose which environment I'm using. This is more flexible for me than just using Django's built in settings.Debug=True/False flag.
from django import template
from templatenodes import GlobalSettingNode
register = template.Library()
MIN_TIME_TEST = 5
DEV_DJANGO_SITE_URL = 'http://localhost:8000/'
DEV_APACHE_SITE_URL = 'http://sandbox.com/'
PROD_SANDBOX_URL = 'http://sandbox.domain.com/'
PROD_URL = 'http://domain.com/'
CURRENT_ENVIRONMENT = 'DEV_DJANGO_SITE_URL'
def get_site_url(parser, token):
return GlobalSettingNode(CURRENT_ENVIRONMENT)
def get_min_time_test(parser, token):
return GlobalSettingNode('MIN_TIME_TEST')
register.tag('site_url', get_site_url)
register.tag('min_time_test', get_min_time_test)
Note that for this to work, django is expecting global_settings.py to be located in a python packaged called templatetags under your Django app. My Django app here is called global_settings, so my directory structure looks like:
/project-name/global_settings/templatetags/global_settings.py
etc.
Finally the template chooses whether to load in global settings or not, which is beneficial for performance. Add this line to your template to expose all the tags registered in global_settings.py:
{% load global_settings %}
Now, other projects that need MIN_TIME_TEST or these environments exposed can simply install this app =)
In the context processor you can use something like:
import settings
context = {}
for item in dir(settings):
#use some way to exclude __doc__, __name__, etc..
if item[0:2] != '__':
context[item] = getattr(settings, item)
Variant on John Mee's last part, with a little elaboration on the same idea Jordan Reiter discusses.
Suppose you have something in your settings akin to what Jordan suggested -- in other words, something like:
GLOBAL_SETTINGS = {
'SOME_CONST': 'thingy',
'SOME_OTHER_CONST': 'other_thingy',
}
Suppose further you already have a dictionary with some of the variables you'd like to pass your template, perhaps passed as arguments to your view. Let's call it my_dict. Suppose you want the values in my_dict to override those in the settings.GLOBAL_SETTINGS dictionary.
You might do something in your view like:
def my_view(request, *args, **kwargs)
from django.conf import settings
my_dict = some_kind_of_arg_parsing(*args,**kwargs)
tmp = settings.GLOBAL_SETTINGS.copy()
tmp.update(my_dict)
my_dict = tmp
render_to_response('the_template.html', my_dict, context_instance=RequestContext(request))
This lets you have the settings determined globally, available to your templates, and doesn't require you to manually type out each of them.
If you don't have any additional variables to pass the template, nor any need to override, you can just do:
render_to_response('the_template.html', settings.GLOBAL_SETTINGS, context_instance=RequestContext(request))
The main difference between what I'm discussing here & what Jordan has, is that for his, settings.GLOBAL_SETTINGS overrides anything it may have in common w/ your context dictionary, and with mine, my context dictionary overrides settings.GLOBAL_SETTINGS. YMMV.

Google App Engine (python): TemplateSyntaxError: 'for' statements with five words should end in 'reversed'

This is using the web app framework, not Django.
The following template code is giving me an TemplateSyntaxError: 'for' statements with five words should end in 'reversed' error when I try to render a dictionary. I don't understand what's causing this error. Could somebody shed some light on it for me?
{% for code, name in charts.items %}
<option value="{{code}}">{{name}}</option>
{% endfor %}
I'm rendering it using the following:
class GenerateChart(basewebview):
def get(self):
values = {"datepicker":True}
values["charts"] = {"p3": "3D Pie Chart", "p": "Segmented Pied Chart"}
self.render_page("generatechart.html", values)
class basewebview(webapp.RequestHandler):
''' Base class for all webapp.RequestHandler type classes '''
def render_page(self, filename, template_values=dict()):
filename = "%s/%s" % (_template_dir, filename)
path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), filename)
self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values))
This is using the web app framework,
not Django.
But framework apart, you must be using Django's templating -- and apparently in an old version, which does not support the "automatic unpacking" style of for -- probably the 0.96 version that's the default for App Engine. To use any part of more modern Django (including "just the templates") you must have a settings.py file and do:
import os
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'settings'
from google.appengine.dist import use_library
use_library('django', '1.1')
as per the docs. After that you can from django import template and you'll be using the 1.1 version of Django's templating engine.

How to make Django template engine to render in memory templates?

I am storing my templates in the database and I don't have any path to provide for the template.render method.
Is there any exposed method which accepts the template as a string?
Is there any workaround?
Based on the the docs for using the template system:
from django.template import Template, Context
t = Template("My name is {{ my_name }}.")
c = Context({"my_name": "Adrian"})
t.render(c)
Instantiate Template with the string to use as a template.
In Django < 1.8:
from django.template.loader import get_template_from_string
tpl = Template(get_template_from_string("My name is {{ my_name }}."))

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