Configuring the template system in standalone mode

This section is only of interest to people trying to use the template system as an output component in another application. If you're using the template system as part of a Django application, nothing here applies to you.

Normally, Django will load all the configuration information it needs from its own default configuration file, combined with the settings in the module given in the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable. But if you're using the template system independently of the rest of Django, the environment variable approach isn't very convenient, because you probably want to configure the template system in line with the rest of your application rather than dealing with settings files and pointing to them via environment variables.

To solve this problem, you need to use the manual configuration option described in Using settings without setting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. Simply import the appropriate pieces of the templating system and then, before you call any of the templating functions, call django.conf.settings.configure() with any settings you wish to specify. You might want to consider setting at least TEMPLATE_DIRS (if you're going to use template loaders), DEFAULT_CHARSET (although the default of utf-8 is probably fine) and TEMPLATE_DEBUG. All available settings are described in the settings documentation, and any setting starting with TEMPLATE_ is of obvious interest.