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by selfhoster1312 6 days ago
It's a practical alternative, but definitely not a drop-in replacement! I've been working on migrating a django project to jinja2 lately, see the diff: https://framagit.org/la-chariotte/la-chariotte/-/merge_reque...

A few notables differences:

- many controls are now functions/variables (that's good!), and some change name, for example `{% csrf_token %}` -> `{{ csrf_input }}`

- calling methods without parenthesis does not work (that's good!), for example `query.all` -> `query.all()`

- in tests` response.context` is replaced by `response.context_data`, which is not set when calling `render` directly (need to return a proper `TemplateResponse`)

- template folders need to be renamed from `templates` to `jinja2`; there may be a way to change this behavior, but i did not find it, and this change is written so small in the docs i lost an entire day over it
2 comments
leetrout 5 days ago
Yea, I was unclear. That's what I meant by "you can't mix them"... just meant using jinja2 is drop it for the backend.

I believe you just set the dirs property in the backend config to look in whatever directory / directories you want it just defaults to jinja2 as you discovered.

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selfhoster1312 4 days ago
From what i understand `DIRS` is only for the top-level app. I couldn't find a way to apply it to inner apps (eg. `auth`, `order`, `etc`). I'd be happy if you know the way i don't have to rename all the template folders!
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seanwilson 5 days ago
Thanks! Any noticeable downsides?
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selfhoster1312 4 days ago
For now, no. But to be fair, it hasn't reached prod yet. So far, only great upsides: developer experience (in templates) is considerably better, and djlint/j2lint make it even better (one for HTML validation through the templating, the other for jinja syntax).

Also, it should be considerably faster to render, but i haven't properly measured yet. I just know on lower hardware, the django template "static" homepage (rendered, but no conditionals and no DB calls) takes average 23ms to serve with variations 14-53ms, while a real static page takes 3ms average with 1-6ms (that's all on localhost so no network instability is measured). Can't wait to have the jinja stats!

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