django-dbtemplates-iplweb

dbtemplates is a Django app that stores templates in the database and exposes them through a regular Django template loader — so templates can be edited from the admin instead of being redeployed as files.

Originally developed by Jannis Leidel and Jazzband. This fork is actively maintained by IPLweb.

Support graciously provided by

Why?

Django's built-in template loaders read from the filesystem or app directories. That works well for developer-owned templates, but not for content that needs to change without a deploy (marketing copy, transactional email bodies, error pages, site-specific overrides). dbtemplates adds a loader that reads templates from a database model, so non-developers can edit them via the admin and changes take effect immediately.

Features

• Database-backed Django template loader — drop-in with the standard TEMPLATES.OPTIONS.loaders chain
• Edit templates through the Django admin (syntax highlighting included)
• Multi-site support via django.contrib.sites — the same template name can resolve to different content per site
• Cache integration with Django's cache framework; invalidation on save
• Management commands:
  • sync_templates — bidirectional sync between the database and filesystem templates
  • check_template_syntax — validate all stored templates
  • create_error_templates — scaffold 404.html / 500.html rows
• Admin actions and optional versioned storage

Supported versions

Python

Django

Matrix derived from tox.ini and Django's own Python support matrix. Django 6.0 and 6.1 require Python 3.12 or newer.

Installation

Using uv (recommended)

uv add django-dbtemplates-iplweb

Using pip

pip install django-dbtemplates-iplweb

The Python import name stays dbtemplates, so no code changes are needed when migrating from upstream django-dbtemplates:

from dbtemplates.models import Template

From git (latest main)

uv add "git+https://github.com/mpasternak/django-dbtemplates-iplweb.git"
# or
pip install "git+https://github.com/mpasternak/django-dbtemplates-iplweb.git"

Quick start

1. Add dbtemplates to INSTALLED_APPS alongside django.contrib.sites and django.contrib.admin:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       "django.contrib.auth",
       "django.contrib.contenttypes",
       "django.contrib.sessions",
       "django.contrib.sites",
       "django.contrib.admin",
       "dbtemplates",
   ]
   

2. Add dbtemplates.loader.Loader to TEMPLATES.OPTIONS.loaders:

   TEMPLATES = [
       {
           "BACKEND": "django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates",
           "OPTIONS": {
               "loaders": [
                   "django.template.loaders.filesystem.Loader",
                   "django.template.loaders.app_directories.Loader",
                   "dbtemplates.loader.Loader",
               ],
           },
       },
   ]
   

   Put dbtemplates.loader.Loader last to use database templates as a fallback, or first to let them override on-disk templates.

3. Apply migrations and start the server:

   python manage.py migrate
   python manage.py runserver
   

4. Open the admin, go to Database templates → Templates, and create entries with a name (e.g. blog/entry_list.html) and template content.

See https://django-dbtemplates.readthedocs.io/ for the complete documentation.

Links

• Documentation: https://django-dbtemplates.readthedocs.io/
• Changelog: https://django-dbtemplates.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changelog.html
• Upstream source: https://github.com/jazzband/django-dbtemplates
• This fork: https://github.com/mpasternak/django-dbtemplates-iplweb

License

BSD — see LICENSE for details.