Can I access constants in settings.py from templat

Question

I have some stuff in settings.py that I'd like to be able to access from a template, but I can't figure out how to do it. I already tried

{{CONSTANT_NAME}}

but that doesn't seem to work. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Check out django-settings-export (disclaimer: I'm the author of this project).

For example...

$ pip install django-settings-export

settings.py

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'OPTIONS': {
            'context_processors': [
                'django_settings_export.settings_export',
            ],
        },
    },
]

MY_CHEESE = 'Camembert';

SETTINGS_EXPORT = [
    'MY_CHEESE',
]

template.html

<script>var MY_CHEESE = '{{ settings.MY_CHEESE }}';</script>

Answer 2

I improved chrisdew's answer (to create your own tag) a little bit.

First, create the file yourapp/templatetags/value_from_settings.py in which you define your own new tag value_from_settings:

from django.template import TemplateSyntaxError, Variable, Node, Variable, Library
from yourapp import settings

register = Library()
# I found some tricks in URLNode and url from defaulttags.py:
# https://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/template/defaulttags.py
@register.tag
def value_from_settings(parser, token):
  bits = token.split_contents()
  if len(bits) < 2:
    raise TemplateSyntaxError("'%s' takes at least one " \
      "argument (settings constant to retrieve)" % bits[0])
  settingsvar = bits[1]
  settingsvar = settingsvar[1:-1] if settingsvar[0] == '"' else settingsvar
  asvar = None
  bits = bits[2:]
  if len(bits) >= 2 and bits[-2] == 'as':
    asvar = bits[-1]
    bits = bits[:-2]
  if len(bits):
    raise TemplateSyntaxError("'value_from_settings' didn't recognise " \
      "the arguments '%s'" % ", ".join(bits))
  return ValueFromSettings(settingsvar, asvar)

class ValueFromSettings(Node):
  def __init__(self, settingsvar, asvar):
    self.arg = Variable(settingsvar)
    self.asvar = asvar
  def render(self, context):
    ret_val = getattr(settings,str(self.arg))
    if self.asvar:
      context[self.asvar] = ret_val
      return ''
    else:
      return ret_val

You can use this tag in your Template via:

{% load value_from_settings %}
[...]
{% value_from_settings "FQDN" %}

or via

{% load value_from_settings %}
[...]
{% value_from_settings "FQDN" as my_fqdn %}

The advantage of the as ... notation is that this makes it easy to use in blocktrans blocks via a simple {{my_fqdn}}.

Answer 3

I found this to be the simplest approach for Django 1.3:

1. views.py

   from local_settings import BASE_URL
   
   def root(request):
       return render_to_response('hero.html', {'BASE_URL': BASE_URL})
   

2. hero.html

   var BASE_URL = '{{ JS_BASE_URL }}';