Templates¶
Flask leverages Jinja2 as its template engine. You are obviously free to use a different template engine, but you still have to install Jinja2 to run Flask itself. This requirement is necessary to enable rich extensions. An extension can depend on Jinja2 being present.
This section only gives a very quick introduction into how Jinja2 is integrated into Flask. If you want information on the template engine’s syntax itself, head over to the official Jinja2 Template Documentation for more information.
Jinja Setup¶
Unless customized, Jinja2 is configured by Flask as follows:
autoescaping is enabled for all templates ending in
.html
,.htm
,.xml
,.xhtml
, as well as.svg
when usingrender_template()
.autoescaping is enabled for all strings when using
render_template_string()
.a template has the ability to opt in/out autoescaping with the
{% autoescape %}
tag.Flask inserts a couple of global functions and helpers into the Jinja2 context, additionally to the values that are present by default.
Standard Context¶
The following global variables are available within Jinja2 templates by default:
- config
The current configuration object (
flask.Flask.config
)Changelog
Changed in version 0.10: This is now always available, even in imported templates.
Added in version 0.6.
- request
The current request object (
flask.request
). This variable is unavailable if the template was rendered without an active request context.
- session
The current session object (
flask.session
). This variable is unavailable if the template was rendered without an active request context.
- g
The request-bound object for global variables (
flask.g
). This variable is unavailable if the template was rendered without an active request context.
- url_for()
The
flask.url_for()
function.
- get_flashed_messages()
The
flask.get_flashed_messages()
function.
The Jinja Context Behavior
These variables are added to the context of variables, they are not global variables. The difference is that by default these will not show up in the context of imported templates. This is partially caused by performance considerations, partially to keep things explicit.
What does this mean for you? If you have a macro you want to import, that needs to access the request object you have two possibilities:
you explicitly pass the request to the macro as parameter, or the attribute of the request object you are interested in.
you import the macro “with context”.
Importing with context looks like this:
{% from '_helpers.html' import my_macro with context %}
Controlling Autoescaping¶
Autoescaping is the concept of automatically escaping special characters
for you. Special characters in the sense of HTML (or XML, and thus XHTML)
are &
, >
, <
, "
as well as '
. Because these characters
carry specific meanings in documents on their own you have to replace them
by so called “entities” if you want to use them for text. Not doing so
would not only cause user frustration by the inability to use these
characters in text, but can also lead to security problems. (see
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS))
Sometimes however you will need to disable autoescaping in templates. This can be the case if you want to explicitly inject HTML into pages, for example if they come from a system that generates secure HTML like a markdown to HTML converter.
There are three ways to accomplish that:
In the Python code, wrap the HTML string in a
Markup
object before passing it to the template. This is in general the recommended way.Inside the template, use the
|safe
filter to explicitly mark a string as safe HTML ({{ myvariable|safe }}
)Temporarily disable the autoescape system altogether.
To disable the autoescape system in templates, you can use the {%
autoescape %}
block:
{% autoescape false %}
<p>autoescaping is disabled here
<p>{{ will_not_be_escaped }}
{% endautoescape %}
Whenever you do this, please be very cautious about the variables you are using in this block.
Registering Filters¶
If you want to register your own filters in Jinja2 you have two ways to do
that. You can either put them by hand into the
jinja_env
of the application or use the
template_filter()
decorator.
The two following examples work the same and both reverse an object:
@app.template_filter('reverse')
def reverse_filter(s):
return s[::-1]
def reverse_filter(s):
return s[::-1]
app.jinja_env.filters['reverse'] = reverse_filter
In case of the decorator the argument is optional if you want to use the
function name as name of the filter. Once registered, you can use the filter
in your templates in the same way as Jinja2’s builtin filters, for example if
you have a Python list in context called mylist
:
{% for x in mylist | reverse %}
{% endfor %}
Context Processors¶
To inject new variables automatically into the context of a template, context processors exist in Flask. Context processors run before the template is rendered and have the ability to inject new values into the template context. A context processor is a function that returns a dictionary. The keys and values of this dictionary are then merged with the template context, for all templates in the app:
@app.context_processor
def inject_user():
return dict(user=g.user)
The context processor above makes a variable called user
available in
the template with the value of g.user
. This example is not very
interesting because g
is available in templates anyways, but it gives an
idea how this works.
Variables are not limited to values; a context processor can also make functions available to templates (since Python allows passing around functions):
@app.context_processor
def utility_processor():
def format_price(amount, currency="€"):
return f"{amount:.2f}{currency}"
return dict(format_price=format_price)
The context processor above makes the format_price
function available to all
templates:
{{ format_price(0.33) }}
You could also build format_price
as a template filter (see
Registering Filters), but this demonstrates how to pass functions in a
context processor.
Streaming¶
It can be useful to not render the whole template as one complete string, instead render it as a stream, yielding smaller incremental strings. This can be used for streaming HTML in chunks to speed up initial page load, or to save memory when rendering a very large template.
The Jinja2 template engine supports rendering a template piece
by piece, returning an iterator of strings. Flask provides the
stream_template()
and stream_template_string()
functions to make this easier to use.
from flask import stream_template
@app.get("/timeline")
def timeline():
return stream_template("timeline.html")
These functions automatically apply the
stream_with_context()
wrapper if a request is active, so
that it remains available in the template.