Django Rusty Templates (Agentic)

Django Rusty Templates (Agentic) is a fork of Lily's Django Rusty Templates library, an experimental reimplementation of Django's templating language in Rust. This fork began as an agentic attempt to try out the idea, exploring compatibility, performance, and shared server/browser templates.

The distribution is named django-rusty-templates-agentic to respect the original project's PyPI namespace. It is intended as a drop-in replacement while upstream develops: Python imports remain django_rusty_templates, and the Django backend remains django_rusty_templates.RustyTemplates. Lily and the upstream contributors retain credit for the original library; see LICENSE.

Template compatibility is tested against Django 5.2, 6.0, and 6.1. Django 6 requires Python 3.12 or newer. Supported templates, including extends and block, compile and execute inheritance in Rust in both debug modes. Rust manages block overrides, block.super, inheritance history, render state, and block scopes; ordinary variables read native context storage. Python contexts are exported at callback, signal, loader, and unsupported-template boundaries. A compatibility bridge preserves mixed native/custom-template inheritance. Partial templates and fully custom Python tag compilers use Django's parser/node interoperability layer. With debug disabled, mixed templates compile supported loops, conditions, variables, includes, URLs and standard helper tags into Rust regions. Opaque custom nodes execute against the original live Django Context at explicit AST boundaries; mixed inheritance keeps its Django block protocol. Debug mode retains Django node rendering for mixed templates. Django 6.2 development support is tested against a pinned main checkout; its now format expressions also use the interoperability layer. See CONTRIBUTING.md for local conformance checks.

To measure inheritance compilation separately from warm rendering and uncached loading plus rendering, run maturin develop --release followed by .venv/bin/python scripts/benchmark_inheritance.py. The benchmark checks output equality and compares Django, native compilation, and the hybrid parser path on a synthetic template; it does not measure application request latency.

Goals

• 100% compatibility of rendered output.
• Error reporting that is at least as useful as Django's errors.
• Improved performance over Django's pure Python implementation.

Versioning

Releases use calendar versioning: YYYY.MM.INCR, with the increment starting at 1 each month. The current package version is 2026.10.12.

To release, run just release-prepare from a clean main checkout. It uses bumpver to pick the next version, updates bumpver.toml, Cargo.toml, Cargo.lock, and this version notice, commits the bump on a release branch, pushes it, and opens a PR. Extra arguments go to bumpver update; for example, just release-prepare --set-version 2026.11.1. Once the PR passes checks and is merged, switch to main and run just release. This pulls the merged version and pushes an annotated tag, triggering the wheel builds and PyPI publishing in GitHub Actions. Check the Build wheels workflow for completion.

Installation

Install the published package from PyPI.

With uv, create a virtual environment if you don't already have one, then install:

uv venv
uv pip install django-rusty-templates-agentic

Or with pip in your Python environment:

pip install django-rusty-templates-agentic

Because both distributions provide the same Python package, uninstall the original before installing this fork in an existing environment:

uv pip uninstall django-rusty-templates
uv pip install django-rusty-templates-agentic

Or with pip:

pip uninstall django-rusty-templates
pip install django-rusty-templates-agentic

For a source installation from GitHub:

uv pip install git+https://github.com/jefftriplett/django-rusty-templates-agentic.git

Or with pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/jefftriplett/django-rusty-templates-agentic.git

Or install from a local checkout:

git clone https://github.com/jefftriplett/django-rusty-templates-agentic.git
cd django-rusty-templates-agentic

Then run uv pip install . (after uv venv if needed) or pip install ..

Prebuilt wheels are used when available for your platform and Python version. Installing from a source distribution or checkout requires a Rust compiler. To switch back to upstream, uninstall django-rusty-templates-agentic before installing the original distribution. Your imports and backend setting stay the same.

Usage

Add an entry to your TEMPLATES setting with "BACKEND" set to "django_rusty_templates.RustyTemplates":

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        "BACKEND": "django_rusty_templates.RustyTemplates",
        ... # Other configuration options
    },
]

WebAssembly for JavaScript clients

This fork also includes an experimental WebAssembly (Wasm) version for JavaScript clients. Templates render directly in the browser using the BrowserEngine JavaScript API, with JSON context data and support for variables, selected filters, conditionals, loops, includes, and inheritance.

The browser engine and the opt-in Python PortableEngine share the same Rust parser and renderer, allowing supported templates to run unchanged on both the server and client. The Wasm version supports a subset of Django's template language; the existing RustyTemplates backend retains its full Django implementation.

See the WebAssembly documentation for build instructions, the JavaScript API, a working demo, and the supported features and limitations.

Contributing

Django Rusty Templates (Agentic) is open to contributions. These can come in many forms:

• Implementing missing features, such as filters and tags built into Django.
• Reporting bugs where Django Rusty Templates gives the wrong result.
• Adding new test cases to ensure Django Rusty Templates behaves the same as Django.
• Adding benchmarks to track performance.
• Refactoring for readability or performance.

For detailed instructions on setting up your development environment and contributing to the project, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Loop rendering regressions

uv run python scripts/benchmark_loop_values.py --json-output results.json measures integer loops, text-only loops, repeated variables, and mixed component loops against Django. It checks output before timing and covers from_string, warm loaded rendering, and loading plus rendering with explicit cached/uncached loaders and both debug settings. Build the extension with uv run maturin develop --release first. These are synthetic timings, not HTTP request measurements.

Run performance comparisons locally on a controlled machine, using matching Python dependencies and release builds for both revisions. GitHub Actions runs correctness checks, not performance comparisons. Correctness tests also reject full Django Context construction during native loop value formatting.

uv run python scripts/benchmark_callback_contexts.py --json-output callbacks.json measures read-only, mutating, retaining and failing captured callables with small and large contexts, using flat and scoped templates through from_string and filesystem loaders. Plain string/integer controls include sparse and dense flat templates so avoiding imports cannot hide a slower native variable path. Flat templates with variables or filters can read an exact Django Context directly when a context dictionary has at least 64 bindings and at least eight bindings per rendering node; this avoids importing unrelated bindings and making callable snapshots. Retained dictionaries are the caller's live dictionaries, as in Django. Scoped templates, context subclasses and request contexts keep their existing synchronization path. Use --baseline locally to compare these cases with the same 15% regression gate.

uv run python scripts/benchmark_render_output.py --json-output output.json also tracks block and with scopes with small and large caller contexts. Each case runs in fresh processes with matching Django controls; use --baseline to check a later revision locally.

engine.explain_template(source, template_name=None) reports mode (native, hybrid, or unsupported) and the first native compilation blocker. For a tag blocker it includes reason, the complete tag token, its UTF-8 byte span (start, length), and its one-based line. Version-specific variable syntax reports no tag location. Inspection loads tag libraries but does not compile a Python fallback tree or render the template; a native report does not imply zero Python callbacks.

Mixed templates expose the original nodes through template.nodelist for Django inspection and direct indexing. template.nodelist.rendering_nodes contains the compiled runtime regions. Inspecting Python nodes does not mean their render methods execute; the component regression tests disable those methods to verify Rust dispatch. Region source spans preserve UTF-8 offsets without rewriting tags.

Isolating custom tag compilers

Rust can keep the surrounding template native while Django compiles an opaque custom tag and the body it consumes. A compiler can opt in with compile_tag.rusty_isolated_compiler = True (set the attribute on the registered compiler function, or on a callable compiler object). For example:

@register.tag("card")
def compile_card(parser, token):
    body = parser.parse(("endcard",))
    parser.delete_first_token()
    return CardNode(body)

compile_card.rusty_isolated_compiler = True

Opt in only when the compiler uses the parser within its consumed span. The adapter supports nested parse(), compile_filter(), next_token(), prepend_token(), delete_first_token(), loaded tags and filters, custom parser attributes, and extra_data. It preserves tokens, line numbers, DEBUG positions, origin source names and template names, compiled node identities, and Django context scopes during rendering. Native nodes surrounding the custom span never enter Django's parser. A load inside the opaque body also makes its filters available to following native nodes. New or replacement custom compilers installed through parser.tags must opt in too; registering an incompatible compiler raises a clear error instead of rerunning the first compiler on the compatibility path.

Leave the compiler unannotated when it inspects prior native nodes, depends on command_stack outside its own body, reads parser.origin.loader, rewrites future tokens, returns inheritance or must_be_first nodes, or changes how native built-in tags compile. The full Django parser remains the default for such compilers. Templates sharing inheritance, named-cycle, or partial registries also retain the compatibility path, even with an opted-in compiler. Mixed opted-in and unannotated custom tags are checked before compilation so the opted-in compiler isn't called twice. Engine.explain_template() reports custom compiler boundaries without executing compilers. Explicit .nodelist inspection of a complex template still parses a separate Django tree and may invoke compilers again; its nodes are distinct from the nodes used for rendering. Rendering never requests this inspection tree.