django-template-debug 0.2

A small collection of template tags for debugging and introspecting templates

A small collection of template tags for debugging and introspecting templates

Installation

django-template-debug is available on pypi, so the easiest way to install it is using pip:

pip install django-template-debug

Setup

Go to your local settings.py (be sure the settings file is not used for a production environment) and add ‘template_debug’ to your installed apps via:

INSTALLED_APPS.append('template_debug')

N.B. - You will need to change your INSTALLED_APPS setting to a list in your base settings.py if it is a tuple or do something like: INSTALLED_APPS = list(INSTALLED_APPS) + ‘template_debug’

Add the following to your local_settings.py:

TEMPLATE_DEBUG = True

Without this setting, the debug templates will return without doing anything. This behavior prevents your application from calling set_trace() or print in a production environment if django-template-debug is accidentally installed outside of the local settings.

Examples

To use django-template-debug simply load the debug tags in a template as follows:

{% load debug_tags %}

Be sure to put your tags inside of a section that you are certain will be rendered. (e.g. make sure the tags are not inside of if tags or not inside of a block tag when needed) Alternatively, you might insert a {% set_trace %} inside of a conditional or for loop to determine if that branch is being excetued in your template.

The available tags are outlined below:

{% set_trace %}

• Starts a set_trace while the template is being rendered. The context is available inside of this tag as the variable ‘context’. ipdb is used if available; otherwise the tag falls back to pdb.

• Type ‘availables’ to see a list of variables inside of the context.

• You can use context[‘variable_name’] or context.variable_name for convenience.

{% variables %}

• Prints the variables available in the current context

{% details <variable_name> %}

• Prints a dictionary in the pattern {attribute: value} of the variable provided, for any attribute’s value that can be obtained without raising an exception or making a method call.

After entering the debugger, one can use details and variables as functions as follows:

details(context.variable_name)
variables(context)