How do I generate a static html file from a django template?

Question

I'm new to Django, and I'm pretty sure I've read or heard about a way to do this, but I can't find it anywhere.

Rather than sending the rendered output from a template to a browser, I want to create an html file that can then be served without the need to go through the rendering process every time. I'm developing on a system that's separate from our main website's server, and I need to make periodic snapshots of my data available to our users without giving them access to the development system.

My intuition says that I should be able to somehow redirect the response to a file, but I'm not seeing it in the docs or in other posts here.

Tierratiersten

You can always render a template to a string, which can then be saved as a file using vanilla Python. Does your use case involve more than that? – Andreas

Answer 1

You can leverage Django's template loader to render your template, including whatever context you pass to it, as a string and then save that out to the filesystem. If you need to save that file on an external system, such as Amazon S3, you can use the Boto library.

Here's an example of how to render a view to a file, using an optional querystring parameter as the trigger...

from django.shortcuts import render
from django.template.loader import render_to_string

def my_view(request):
    as_file = request.GET.get('as_file')
    context = {'some_key': 'some_value'}

    if as_file:
        content = render_to_string('your-template.html', context)                
        with open('path/to/your-template-static.html', 'w') as static_file:
            static_file.write(content)

    return render('your-template.html', context)

Andreas

@Paolo 's comment was helpful for me. If you get an error like "'ascii' codec can't encode character". Use Paolo's approach for Python 2. In Python 3, do open('path', 'w', encoding='utf-8') – Unicellular

To avoid hidden encoding problems and headache... Maybe change the line open('path/to/your-template-static.html', 'w') to open('path/to/your-template-static.html', 'w', encoding="UTF-8") or any other encoding you want. – Shiver

Answer 2

django-bakery is a well-developed "set of helpers for baking your Django site out as flat files".

Chamblee

Answer 3

There's a well developed Django app specifically for this: django-render-static

Delastre