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) 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.

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

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': 'edureka.co'})

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

The output would be

{edureka.co}

Hope it helps!!