Question

I want to be able to put certain configuration information in my settings.py file – things like the site name, site url, etc.

If I do this, how can I then access those settings in templates?

Thanks

Answer 1

Let’s say in your settings.py file you have:

SITE_URL='www.mydomain.tld/somewhere/'
SITE_NAME='My site'

If you need that in just one or two views:

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.conf import settings

def my_view(request, ...):
    response_dict = {
        'site_name': settings.SITE_NAME,
        'site_url': settings.SITE_URL,
    }
    ...
    return render_to_response('my_template_dir/my_template.html', response_dict)

If you need to access these across a lot of apps and/or views, you can write a context processor to save code:

James has a tutorial on this
online.

Some useful information on the when and if of context processors is available on this very site
here.

Inside your my_context_processors.py file you would:

from django.conf import settings

def some_context_processor(request):
    my_dict = {
        'site_url': settings.SITE_URL,
        'site_name': settings.SITE_NAME,
    }

    return my_dict

Back in your settings.py, activate it by doing:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    ...

    # yours
    'my_context_processors.some_context_processor',
)

In your views.py, make a view use it like so:

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.template import RequestContext

def my_view(request, ...):  
    response_dict = RequestContext(request)
    ...
    # you can still still add variables that specific only to this view
    response_dict['some_var_only_in_this_view'] = 42
    ...
    return render_to_response('my_template_dir/my_template.html', response_dict)