Flask-Themer

Simple theme support for flask apps.

Flask-Themer is inspired by the (seemingly) abandoned flask-themes project, but has been written from scratch for Python 3.8+. However, it is not immediately compatible with flask-themes and does not seek to be. Flask-Themer tries to have little opinion on how you actually structure your project and its themes and does not require a particular metadata format/file.

Flask-Themer releases follow Semantic Versioning. Flask-Themer has 100% test coverage and considers it an error to fall below 100%.

Installation

Install the latest release from PyPi:

pip install flask-themer

or get the latest development version from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/TkTech/flask-themer.git
cd flask-themer
python setup.py develop

Quickstart

Flask-Themer usage is usually very basic, and once setup you likely won't need to touch it again. Let's do a quickstart. Notice how we import render_template from flask_themer instead of flask.

Our app.py looks like this:

from flask import Flask
from flask_themer import Themer, render_template

app = Flask(__name__)
themer = Themer(app)


@themer.current_theme_loader
def get_current_theme():
    # This is where you would look up the current user's theme if one was
    # logged in, for example.
    return 'default'

@app.route('/')
def hello_world():
    return render_template('hello.html')

And next to it we have a directory called themes with a directory called default inside of it. Our themes/default/hello.html looks like this:

Hello world!

That's it! By default Flask-Themer will look for a themes directory next to your project and assume all the directories inside of it are themes. You can change what directory it looks for with THEMER_DEFAULT_DIRECTORY, or specify the template loaders explicitly to overwrite the default:

from flask_themer import Themer, FileSystemThemeLoader

app = Flask(__name__)
themer = Themer(app, loaders=[
    FileSystemThemeLoader(app, os.path.join(
        app.root_path,
        'also_themes'
    ))
])

Using Themes From Templates

Two template globals are added once Flask-Themer is setup, theme() and theme_static() (just like flask-themes). These methods look up the currently active theme and look for the given path in that theme, returning a special path that Jinja can use to load it.

{% extends theme("base.html") %}

{% block header %}
    {{ super() }}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ theme_static("bootstrap.css") }}">
{% endblock %}

Themes can also extend other themes using the theme argument:

{% extends theme("base.html", theme="my_parent_theme") %}

Theme Loaders

Theme loaders are the mechanism by which Flask-Themer discovers what themes are available. You can create a custom loader to get themes from a ZIP file, or a database for example. Usually if you create a new ThemeLoader you'll also need to create a new Jinja template loader so Jinja knows how to read individual templates. Lets do a very minimal example that loads just a single theme from a ZIP file.

from zipfile import ZipFile
from flask_themer import ThemeLoader, Theme
from jinja2.loaders import BaseLoader, TemplateNotFound

class ZipFileTemplateLoader(BaseLoader):
    def __init__(self, *args, archive, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.archive = archive

    def get_source(self, environment, template):
        try:
            return (self.archive.read(template), None, False)
        except KeyError:
            raise TemplateNotFound(template)


class ZipFileThemeLoader(ThemeLoader):
    def __init__(self, path_to_zip):
        self.archive = ZipFile(path_to_zip)

    @property
    def themes(self):
        yield Theme(
            name='my_dumb_theme',
            theme_loader=self,
            jinja_loader=ZipFileTemplateLoader(archive=self.archive),
        )

    def get_static(self, theme, path):
        return self.archive.read(path)

And then to use our new loaders we update our previous example:

...
themer = Themer(app, loaders=[
    ZipFileThemeLoader('my_dumb_theme.zip')
])
...

Pretty simple right? You can see how we could easily create a loader to load multiple themes from an archive, or load a user's customized theme from a database.