Using Jinja2 with Django, load tag does not work

Question

I'm building a Django app and chose to use Jinja2 for my templating engine. I noticed after I switched from Django's built in templating engine to Jinja2 the load keyword would not work, ex: {% load static %}. This is used to load static files like CSS. Is there a Jinja workaround for this in Django?

TemplateSyntaxError at /app/
Encountered unknown tag 'load'.

From settings.py:

TEMPLATES = [
{
    'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.jinja2.Jinja2',
    'DIRS': [
        os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'app/templates/jinja2'),
    ],
    'APP_DIRS': True,
    'OPTIONS': {
        'environment': 'my_project.jinja2.environment',
    },
},

Django: 1.11
Jinja2: 2.9.6

Answer 1

This is explained in the manual section for Jinja2 in django template reference

The default configuration is purposefully kept to a minimum. If a template is rendered with a request (e.g. when using render()), the Jinja2 backend adds the globals request, csrf_input, and csrf_token to the context. Apart from that, this backend doesn’t create a Django-flavored environment. It doesn’t know about Django filters and tags. In order to use Django-specific APIs, you must configure them into the environment.

Yes, {% load static %} does not exists, but there is a simple work around. Again, the example is from the reference

from __future__ import absolute_import  # Python 2 only

from django.contrib.staticfiles.storage import staticfiles_storage
from django.urls import reverse

from jinja2 import Environment


def environment(**options):
    env = Environment(**options)
    env.globals.update({
        'static': staticfiles_storage.url,
        'url': reverse,
    })
    return env