Load Template outside Django Project Directory

Question

I have a Django project that is going to use React as the frontend. The project structure is as follows:

ProjectName/
├── api/
│   └── otherapp1/
│   └── otherapp2/
│   └── api/
│      └── views.py (will contain the method for loading react page)
│      └── settings.py
│   └── manage.py
└── frontend/
    └── public/
        └── index.html (react root page)

How can I load the index.html page with Django so I can use django for authentication and cookie/session management? I can't figure out how to configure the template/template dirs properly since it's outside the root folder for the django part of the project.

The boilerplate I was using is here

It might be relevant to note that since it is a docker project, there are 3 containers. One for the database, one for django, and one for the frontend. BASE_DIR in my django project resolves to /app/api. It might be that I need to access a directory in another container, but if I can't do that, then how should I go about linking Django to my React app?

Answer 1

Update the TEMPLATE config in settings(api/api/settings.py):

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
        'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, '../frontend/public')],
        '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',
            ],
        },
    },
]

Now Django would look for template files in frontend/public directory