Creating email templates with Django

Question

From the docs, to send HTML e-mail you want to use alternative content-types, like this:

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives

subject, from_email, to = 'hello', '[email protected]', '[email protected]'
text_content = 'This is an important message.'
html_content = '<p>This is an <strong>important</strong> message.</p>'
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, text_content, from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.send()

You'll probably want two templates for your e-mail - a plain text one that looks something like this, stored in your templates directory under email.txt:

Hello {{ username }} - your account is activated.

and an HTMLy one, stored under email.html:

Hello <strong>{{ username }}</strong> - your account is activated.

You can then send an e-mail using both those templates by making use of get_template, like this:

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
from django.template.loader import get_template
from django.template import Context

plaintext = get_template('email.txt')
htmly     = get_template('email.html')

d = Context({ 'username': username })

subject, from_email, to = 'hello', '[email protected]', '[email protected]'
text_content = plaintext.render(d)
html_content = htmly.render(d)
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, text_content, from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.send()

Since Django's 1.7 in send_email method the html_message parameter was added.

html_message: If html_message is provided, the resulting email will be a multipart/alternative email with message as the text/plain content type and html_message as the text/html content type.

So you can just:

from django.core.mail import send_mail
from django.template.loader import render_to_string


msg_plain = render_to_string('templates/email.txt', {'some_params': some_params})
msg_html = render_to_string('templates/email.html', {'some_params': some_params})

send_mail(
    'email title',
    msg_plain,
    '[email protected]',
    ['[email protected]'],
    html_message=msg_html,
)

I have made django-templated-email in an effort to solve this problem, inspired by this solution (and the need to, at some point, switch from using django templates to using a mailchimp etc. set of templates for transactional, templated emails for my own project). It is still a work-in-progress though, but for the example above, you would do:

from templated_email import send_templated_mail
send_templated_mail(
        'email',
        '[email protected]',
        ['[email protected]'],
        { 'username':username }
    )

With the addition of the following to settings.py (to complete the example):

TEMPLATED_EMAIL_DJANGO_SUBJECTS = {'email':'hello',}

This will automatically look for templates named 'templated_email/email.txt' and 'templated_email/email.html' for the plain and html parts respectively, in the normal django template dirs/loaders (complaining if it cannot find at least one of those).

Use EmailMultiAlternatives and render_to_string to make use of two alternative templates (one in plain text and one in html):

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
from django.template import Context
from django.template.loader import render_to_string

c = Context({'username': username})    
text_content = render_to_string('mail/email.txt', c)
html_content = render_to_string('mail/email.html', c)

email = EmailMultiAlternatives('Subject', text_content)
email.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
email.to = ['[email protected]']
email.send()

I know this is an old question, but I also know that some people are just like me and are always looking for uptodate answers, since old answers can sometimes have deprecated information if not updated.

Its now January 2020, and I am using Django 2.2.6 and Python 3.7

Note: I use DJANGO REST FRAMEWORK, the code below for sending email was in a model viewset in my views.py

So after reading multiple nice answers, this is what I did.

from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives

def send_receipt_to_email(self, request):

    emailSubject = "Subject"
    emailOfSender = "[email protected]"
    emailOfRecipient = '[email protected]'

    context = ({"name": "Gilbert"}) #Note I used a normal tuple instead of  Context({"username": "Gilbert"}) because Context is deprecated. When I used Context, I got an error > TypeError: context must be a dict rather than Context

    text_content = render_to_string('receipt_email.txt', context, request=request)
    html_content = render_to_string('receipt_email.html', context, request=request)

    try:
        #I used EmailMultiAlternatives because I wanted to send both text and html
        emailMessage = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject=emailSubject, body=text_content, from_email=emailOfSender, to=[emailOfRecipient,], reply_to=[emailOfSender,])
        emailMessage.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
        emailMessage.send(fail_silently=False)

    except SMTPException as e:
        print('There was an error sending an email: ', e) 
        error = {'message': ",".join(e.args) if len(e.args) > 0 else 'Unknown Error'}
        raise serializers.ValidationError(error)

Important! So how does render_to_string get receipt_email.txt and receipt_email.html? In my settings.py, I have TEMPLATES and below is how it looks

Pay attention to DIRS, there is this line os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates', 'email_templates') .This line is what makes my templates accessible. In my project_dir, I have a folder called templates, and a sub_directory called email_templates like this project_dir->templates->email_templates. My templates receipt_email.txt and receipt_email.html are under the email_templates sub_directory.

TEMPLATES = [
{
    'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
    'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates'), os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates', 'email_templates')],
    'APP_DIRS': True,
    'OPTIONS': {
        'context_processors': [
            'django.template.context_processors.debug',
            'django.template.context_processors.request',
            'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
            'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
        ],
    },
},
]

Let me just add that, my recept_email.txt looks like this;

Dear {{name}},
Here is the text version of the email from template

And, my receipt_email.html looks like this;

Dear {{name}},
<h1>Now here is the html version of the email from the template</h1>