django-template-email provides a set of tools that allows you to easily build plain-text or HTML emails using templates.
After installing django-templatee-email, add template_email
to your INSTALLED_APPS
in settings.py
.
An email template is like any other django template. To use the template as an email, however, you must load the "email" templatetag library and use its tags to define the different parts of the email. The email templatetag library gives you three different tags to use: subject
, body
, and bodyhtml
, each with their respective endsubject
, endbody
, and endbodyhtml
.
For example :
{% load email %}
{% subject %}Thank you for signing up!{% endsubject %}
{% body %}
Hello, {{ first_name }}.
Thank you for signing up. To find out more information, please visit
http://www.example.com/foo/.
Sincerely,
The Team
{% endbody %}
{% bodyhtml %}
Hello, <em>{{ first_name }}</em>.
Thank you for signing up. To find out more information, click
<a href="http://www.example.com/foo/">here</a>.
{% endbodyhtml %}
Each tag is entirely optional. You can set any part of the email as you normally would with Djanog's EmailMessage class.
The TemplateEmail class is a subclass of django.core.mail.EmailMultiAlternatives, which itself is a subclass of django.core.mail.EmailMessage.
To send your email template as an email, simply instantiate the TemplateEmail class while passing it your template and (optionally) a context dict:
from template_email import TemplateEmail
context = {'first_name': user.first_name}
email = TemplateEmail(template='email/confirmation_message.html', context=context)
email.send()
Of course, you may also extend the TemplateEmail class to suit your needs. The TemplateEmail class is initialized with optional keyword arguments of template
and context
. However, template and context variables may be overridden as a property as well. The TemplateEmail class has the following properties:
template
: The template used to render the emailcontext
: The context provided to the templatesubject
: The subject of the emailbody
: The plan-text body of the emailhtml
: The html to attach as an alternative type
The subject
, body
, and html
properties are intended as defaults, and will be overridden by whatever is given in the template.
When you call the send()
method, the TemplateEmail class first renders the given template into the different parts of the email. The templatetags simply dump their contents into temporary context variables for the render()
method use. The render method then renders the contents of each tag separately into the class's subject
, body
, and bodyhtml
properties.
As a convienience, the send()
method will automatically convert User model instances to email recipients, formatting them as "first_name last_name <email>".
Set TEMPLATE_EMAIL_USE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = True
in settings.py
to have TemplateEmail run Django template context processors from TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS
to collect the initial context. The request
parameter will be passed as None
. All exceptions will be silenced.
This can be used to pass request-independent context variables (such as that come from django.core.context_processors.media
) to your email templates.
Some email clients strip out <head> and <style> tags from emails, and TemplateEmail can automatically inline your CSS styles as long as you include them directly within <style> tags.
To enable this, add TEMPLATE_EMAIL_INLINE_CSS = True
to your settings.py
.
Set TEMPLATE_EMAIL_BASE_URL
in settings.py
to the base URL of your site to have TemplateEmail automatically convert relative links to absolute.