Question

I’m (slowly!) working my way through the Django tutorial, and I’ve reached the point in Part 2 where I’m supposed to set the template_dir. I’m on a Mac (at work) where my user profile resides on a server, and I can’t figure out how to set the path.

The tutorial files are in a folder called “tutorialshell”, inside a folder called “Django,” which is a first-level file inside my user folder “mattshepherd”. That folder is the native folder when I launch the Terminal, for instance: it always starts me inside “mattshepherd”.

I’ve tried

"~/Django/tutorialshell/templates"

and

"home/Django/tutorialshell/templates"

with no luck so far. I imagine there’s some trick to doing this, as the files I’m trying to link to are on the network drive in my user folder, not on my local hard drive. Advice?

Answer 1

You want the absolute, not relative path. If you go to ~/Django/tutorialshell/templates in your terminal and then type pwd, it will tell you the full path to that folder. That’s the value you should enter for the path.

Also: I assume you’re actually talking about TEMPLATE_DIRS? If so, keep in mind that it’s a list of paths, so it should look like:

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    "/path/to/Django/tutorialshell/templates", # don't forget that trailing comma!
)