Question

My flask app layout is:

myapp/
    run.py
    admin/
        __init__.py
        views.py
        pages/
            index.html
    main/
        __init__.py
        views.py
        pages/
            index.html

_init_.py files are empty. admin/views.py content is:

from flask import Blueprint, render_template
admin = Blueprint('admin', __name__, template_folder='pages')

@admin.route('/')
def index():
    return render_template('index.html')

main/views.py is similar to admin/views.py:

from flask import Blueprint, render_template
main = Blueprint('main', __name__, template_folder='pages')

@main.route('/')
def index():
    return render_template('index.html')

run.py is:

from flask import Flask
from admin.views import admin
from main.views import main

app = Flask(__name__)
app.register_blueprint(admin, url_prefix='/admin')
app.register_blueprint(main, url_prefix='/main')

print app.url_map

app.run()

Now, if I access http://127.0.0.1:5000/admin/, it correctly displays admin/index.html.
However, http://127.0.0.1:5000/main/ shows still admin/index.html instead of main/index.html. I checked app.url_map:

<Rule 'admin' (HEAD, OPTIONS, GET) -> admin.index,
<Rule 'main' (HEAD, OPTIONS, GET) -> main.index,

Also, I verified that index function in main/views.py is called as expected.
If I rename main/index.html to something different then it works. So, without
renaming, how can achieve that 1http://127.0.0.1:5000/main/1 shows main/index.html?

Answer 1

As of Flask 0.8, blueprints add the specified template_folder to the app’s searchpath, rather than treating each of the directories as separate entities. This means that if you have two templates with the same filename, the first one found in the searchpath is the one used. This is admittedly confusing, and is poorly documented at this time (see this bug). It seems that you weren’t the only one that was confused by this behavior.

The design reason for this behavior is so that blueprint templates can be easily overriden from the main app’s templates, which are first-in-line in Flask’s template searchpath.

Two options come to mind.

• Rename each of the index.html files to be unique (e.g. admin.html
  and main.html).
• In each of the template folders, put each of the
  templates in a subdirectory of the blueprint folder and then call
  the template using that subdirectory. Your admin template, for example, would be yourapp/admin/pages/admin/index.html, and then called from within
  the blueprint as render_template('admin/index.html').