How to download jinja template directly from file system

Question

The jinja API doc on pocoo.org states:

The easiest way to configure Jinja2 to download templates for your application is something like this:

from jinja2 import Environment, PackageLoader env = Environment(loader=PackageLoader('yourapplication', 'templates')) 

This will create a template environment with default settings and a loader that looks for templates in the templates folder inside the python package yourapplication .

As it turned out, this is not so simple because you need to create / install a python package with your templates, which creates a lot of unnecessary complexity, especially if you are not going to distribute your code. You can address SUCH questions on the topic here and here , but the answers are vague and unsatisfactory.

Obviously, a naive beginner just wants to download the template directly from the file system, and not as a resource in the package. How to do it?

Answer 1

Here's how : use FileSystemLoader instead of PackageLoader . I found examples on the Internet here and here . Suppose you have a Python file in the same directory as your template:

 ./index.py ./template.html 

This index.py will find the template and display it:

 #!/usr/bin/python import jinja2 templateLoader = jinja2.FileSystemLoader(searchpath="./") templateEnv = jinja2.Environment(loader=templateLoader) TEMPLATE_FILE = "template.html" template = templateEnv.get_template(TEMPLATE_FILE) outputText = template.render() # this is where to put args to the template renderer print(outputText) 

It turns out that the jinja2 API documentation has a section that discusses all the built-in loaders , so it's a little awkward not to notice this right away. But the introduction is worded so that PackageLoader seems to be the “easiest” default method. For newcomers to python, this can lead to a wild goose chase.

Answer 2

An easier way is to directly call the jinj2.Template constructor and use open to load the file:

 from jinja2 import Template with open('template.html.jinja2') as file_: template = Template(file_.read()) template.render(name='John') 

Answer 3

Here is one liner:

 template = Template(open('template_file.j2').read()) 

Then you can display the template in another line or for all in one line:

 rendered = Template(open('template_file.j2').read()).render(var="TEXT")