django-mustachejs

A templatetag for easier integration of mustache.js JavaScript templates with Django templates. Inspired by ICanHaz.js, django-icanhaz, and jquery.mustache.

Quickstart

Dependencies

Tested with Django 1.3 through trunk, and Python 2.6 and 2.7. Almost certainly works with older versions of both.

Installation

Install from PyPI with pip:

pip install django-mustachejs

or get the in-development version:

pip install django-mustachejs==dev

Usage

• Add "mustachejs" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
• Set the MUSTACHEJS_DIRS setting to a list of full (absolute) path to directories where you will store your mustache templates. By default this is set to a directory named jstemplates.
• Set the MUSTACHEJS_EXTS setting to a list of the app should search for to find template files. By default this is set to ['mustache', 'html']. Order matters (e.g., *.mustache will take precedence over *.html).
• {% load mustachejs %} and use {% mustachejs "templatename" %} in your Django templates to safely embed the mustache.js template at <MUSTACHEJS_DIRS-entry>/templatename.html into your Django template. It will be stored in the Mustache.TEMPLATES object as a string, accessible as Mustache.TEMPLATES.templatename.
• In your HTML header, include mustache/js/mustache-<version>.js. The versions shipped with django-mustache are 0.3.0 and 0.4.0-dev.
• In your JavaScript, use Mustache.to_html(Mustache.TEMPLATES.templatename, {...}, Mustache.TEMPLATES) to render your mustache template. Alternatively, if you include the mustache/js/django.mustache.js script in your HTML, you can use Mustache.template('templatename').render({...}) to render your mustache template.

Advanced usage

You can also bundle MustacheJS templates with Django reusable apps; by default django-mustache will look for templates in a jstemplates subdirectory of each app in INSTALLED_APPS. The app subdirectory name(s) to check can be configured via the MUSTACHEJS_APP_DIRNAMES setting, which defaults to ["jstemplates"].

The finding of templates can be fully controlled via the MUSTACHEJS_FINDERS setting, which is a list of dotted paths to finder classes. A finder class should be instantiable with no arguments, and have a find(name) method which returns the full absolute path to a template file, given a base-name.

By default, MUSTACHEJS_FINDERS contains "mustachejs.finders.FilesystemFinder" (which searches directories listed in MUSTACHEJS_DIRS) and "mustachejs.finders.AppFinder" (which searches subdirectories named in MUSTACHEJS_APP_DIRNAMES of each app in INSTALLED_APPS), in that order -- thus templates found in MUSTACHEJS_DIRS take precedence over templates in apps.

Rationale (from django-icanhaz)

The collision between Django templates' use of {{ and }} as template variable markers and mustache.js' use of same has spawned a variety of solutions. One solution simply replaces [[ and ]] with {{ and }} inside an mustachejs template tag; another makes a valiant attempt to reconstruct verbatim text within a chunk of a Django template after it has already been mangled by the Django template tokenizer.

I prefer to keep my JavaScript templates in separate files in a dedicated directory anyway, to avoid confusion between server-side and client-side templating. So my contribution to the array of solutions is essentially just an "include" tag that avoids parsing the included file as a Django template (and for convenience, automatically wraps it in the script tag that ICanHaz.js expects to find it in).

Enjoy!