There are two main ways to organize your template structure in Django: the default app-level way and a custom project-level approach.
Option 1: App Level
By default the Django template loader will look within each app for a templates
folder. But to avoid namespace issues you also need to repeat the app name in a folder below that before adding your template file.
For example, if we had an example_project
with a pages
app and a home.html
template file, the proper structure would be like this: within the pages
app we create a templates
directory, then a pages
directory, and finally our home.html
file.
├── example_project
│ ├── __init__.py
│ ├── settings.py
│ ├── urls.py
│ └── wsgi.py
| └── pages
| ├── __init__.py
│ ├── admin.py
│ ├── apps.py
│ ├── models.py
│ ├── tests.py
│ └── views.py
| ├── templates
| ├── pages
| ├── home.html
└── manage.py
This is demonstrated in the official Django polls tutorial and works just fine.
Option 2: Project Level
As a Django projects grow in size it's often more convenient to have all the templates in one place rather than hunting for them within multiple apps. With a single line change to our settings.py
file, we can do this.
Update the 'DIRS'
config under TEMPLATES
as follows, which specifies that in addition to looking for an app-level templates directory, the Django template loader should also look for a project-level templates directory.
# settings.py
TEMPLATES = [
{
...
'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')],
...
},
]
Then create a templates
directory at the same level as the project. Here's an example of what it would look like with the home.html
file.
├── example_project
│ ├── __init__.py
│ ├── settings.py
│ ├── urls.py
│ └── wsgi.py
| └── pages
| ├── __init__.py
│ ├── admin.py
│ ├── apps.py
│ ├── models.py
│ ├── tests.py
│ └── views.py
├── templates
├── home.html
└── manage.py
Next Steps
Remember the Django template loader will look for an app-level templates
directory and then--if we update the DIRS
setting--it will also look for a project-level templates
directory. There is no "right" way to organize templates within your Django project but many developers, myself included, prefer the project-level approach.
Top comments (0)