4. Integration

Jinja2 provides some code for integration into other tools such as frameworks, the Babel library or your favourite editor for fancy code highlighting. This is a brief description of whats included.

Files to help integration are available here.

4.1. Babel Integration

Jinja provides support for extracting gettext messages from templates via a Babel extractor entry point called jinja2.ext.babel_extract. The Babel support is implemented as part of the i18n Extension extension.

Gettext messages extracted from both trans tags and code expressions.

To extract gettext messages from templates, the project needs a Jinja2 section in its Babel extraction method mapping file:

[jinja2: **/templates/**.html]
encoding = utf-8

The syntax related options of the Environment are also available as configuration values in the mapping file. For example to tell the extraction that templates use % as line_statement_prefix you can use this code:

[jinja2: **/templates/**.html]
encoding = utf-8
line_statement_prefix = %

Extensions may also be defined by passing a comma separated list of import paths as extensions value. The i18n extension is added automatically.

Changed in version 2.7: Until 2.7 template syntax errors were always ignored. This was done since many people are dropping non template html files into the templates folder and it would randomly fail. The assumption was that testsuites will catch syntax errors in templates anyways. If you don’t want that behavior you can add silent=false to the settings and exceptions are propagated.

4.2. Pylons

With Pylons 0.9.7 onwards it’s incredible easy to integrate Jinja into a Pylons powered application.

The template engine is configured in config/environment.py. The configuration for Jinja2 looks something like that:

from jinja2 import Environment, PackageLoader
config['pylons.app_globals'].jinja_env = Environment(
    loader=PackageLoader('yourapplication', 'templates')
)

After that you can render Jinja templates by using the render_jinja function from the pylons.templating module.

Additionally it’s a good idea to set the Pylons’ c object into strict mode. Per default any attribute to not existing attributes on the c object return an empty string and not an undefined object. To change this just use this snippet and add it into your config/environment.py:

config['pylons.strict_c'] = True

4.3. TextMate

There is a bundle for TextMate that supports syntax highlighting for Jinja1 and Jinja2 for text based templates as well as HTML. It also contains a few often used snippets.

4.4. Vim

A syntax plugin for Vim exists in the Vim-scripts directory as well as the ext folder at the root of the Jinja2 project. The script supports Jinja1 and Jinja2. Once installed two file types are available jinja and htmljinja. The first one for text based templates, the latter for HTML templates.

Copy the files into your syntax folder.