Question

I’m doing the Django tutorial, part 3: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial03/

I currently have this text in my views.py:

from django.http import HttpResponse

from polls.models import Poll

def index(request):
    latest_poll_list = Poll.objects.order_by('-pub_date')[:5]
    output = ', '.join([p.question for p in latest_poll_list])
    return HttpResponse(output)

This works when i go to:
http://localhost:8000/polls/, it displays the records

The problem is when I take the next step and change the views.py to:

from django.shortcuts import render

from polls.models import Poll

def index(request):
    latest_poll_list = Poll.objects.all().order_by('-pub_date')[:5]
    context = {'latest_poll_list': latest_poll_list}
    return render(request, 'polls/index.html', context)

From http://localhost:8000/polls/ it shows the following error:
TemplateDoesNotExist at /polls/
From http://localhost:8000/polls/index.html it shows this error:
Page not found (404)

I have my mysite/urls.py set to:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^polls/', include('polls.urls')),
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)

I have my poll/views.py set to:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^$', views.index, name='index'),

I have my TEMPLATE_DIRS set to:

'/path/to/mysite/templates'

Why won’t the page load with the new code?

Answer 1

You don’t show the entire TEMPLATE_DIRS setting. But I suspect you have this:

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    '/path/to/mysite/templates'
)

when you should actually have this:

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    '/path/to/mysite/templates',
)

Note the extra comma after the end of the string. The comma is required for a single-element tuple in Python – otherwise, it’s just a string in brackets.