Using absolute paths in django templates

Question

Recently I've been working on a project in Django that uses a site-wide CSS layout, so I decided that each template (in this case a template in /projects/index.html) used would extend a base file containing the header, footer, javascript, etc. called base.html.

The problem is that my directory structure looks like so:

.
├── static
│   └── base.html
├── templates
│   └── projects
│   └── index.html

And, as you can see the base file I want to extend is in a higher directory than that of the index.html file. Normally, I would use a relative path and use the following code at the top of the index file: {% extends "../base.html" %} or simply use an absolute path to the file (if necessary)

It seems, however, that by using either of these methods, whatever is inside the quotes for extends simply gets appended onto the current path, and my call to the upper directory with .. gets ignored entirely.

That is, if the current path is, for example, /project/templates/projects and I use {% extends "/project/static/base.html" %}, that will be appended to the current path, causing the system to look for /project/templates/projects/project/static/base.html, which, of course, doesn't exist. After researching I came across an article that said the blocking of relative paths is intentional for security purposes, but it leaves me with no way to access any file outside the current working directory.

I figured this had to be an extremely common setup when building a website, and so there must be some sort of way to interact with multiple templates that I'm just not aware of yet. If anyone has any information on that, it would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Your base.html should be residing in a templates directory and not in the static directory.

This is because you define where django searches for templates using the TEMPLATE_DIRS in your settings.py file. Here, I give an example which computes your TEMPLATE_DIRS value dynamically.

import os

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), '..', 'templates'),
)

In additional, you need to be aware that django depends on another setting called TEMPLATE_LOADERS to determine the priority in which it loads up your html files/templates, while searching through your templates directories.

TEMPLATE_LOADERS = (
    'django.template.loaders.filesystem.Loader',
    'django.template.loaders.app_directories.Loader',
    # 'django.template.loaders.eggs.Loader',
)

Once your base.html is located in your templates directory, all you need to do in your html files is to write:-

{% extends "base.html" %}

and you would extend correctly

Answer 2

All of your html templates should live under the templates directory (including your base.html). The location of this folder is set using the TEMPLATE_DIRECTORY settings in your settings.py. The static folder is solely for css, js, etc.

When inheriting from another template using the extends tag, the path you give is always relative to your template directory, not project.