Using Jinja2 with Django (since 1.8)

Django, jinja, Python, template

On the Medium Corporation resource, a user named Samu shares his experience using Jinja2.
According to him, he previously used Jinja2 in his projects built with Flask. But then I decided to use Jinja2 with Django for potential performance gains (10-20x faster compared to Django templates) and interaction with Nunjucks.
Samu shares his experience with people who are already familiar with these technologies, and his article is intended to reveal and simplify the steps a little.

If you're just getting started with Django, he recommends starting with a great tutorial at this link . You can also see some simple instructions for Jinja2 from Django here .
So let's get started.

Install and configure Jinja2 first

pip install Jinja2

and don't forget to add it to the needs.txt file. Then add the following templating engine settings to the TEMPLATES variable in settings.py

{
   ‘BACKEND’: ‘django.template.backends.jinja2.Jinja2’,
   ‘DIRS’: [],
   ‘APP_DIRS’: True,
   ‘OPTIONS’: {
     ‘environment’: ‘your-app.jinja2.environment’
   },
 }

So, all template settings look something like this:

TEMPLATES = [
 {
   ‘BACKEND’: ‘django.template.backends.jinja2.Jinja2’,
   ‘DIRS’: [],
   ‘APP_DIRS’: True,
   ‘OPTIONS’: {
     ‘environment’: ‘your-app.jinja2.environment’
   },
 },
 {
   ‘BACKEND’: ‘django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates’,
   ‘DIRS’: [],
   ‘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’,
     ],
   },
 },
]

Don't forget to also change the Jinja2 settings environment variable to the correct app name (change "your-app" to whatever your app folder is called).
The options environment allows us to use certain features in templates that are further customized. Create a jinja2.py file in your application folder (in the same place as the settings.py file) and add the following:

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

This allows us to use Django template tags like {% url 'index' %} or {% static 'path / to / static / file.js' %} in our Jinja2 templates. As you can see, these template tags use the actual functionality provided by Django. Following the Jinja2 way of calling functions in a template, you can use them like this:
В Django:

{% url ‘index’ variable %}

which is equivalent in Jinja2:

{{url(‘index’, args=[variable])}}

And for named variables you can use:

{{url('index', kwargs={'variable_key':variable}}}

В Django:

{% static ‘path’ %}

which is equivalent to

{{ static(‘path’)}}

As you've probably already noticed, you can basically add any functionality to the Jinja2 environment by adding it to the jinja2.py file for later use in templates.

Final installation folders

Once you've got your settings right, you can then simply create a Jinja2 folder anywhere you'd like a templates folder to be created. It should work automatically since Django is a pretty good framework. Having both Django and Jinja2 templates allows you the flexibility to use both. For example, you might have a Django admin panel, and various plugins to work with that use Django templates. Be sure to read the Jinja2 documentation to learn more.
Below is an example of what one application folder structure might look like for a project: