django-tagconstants

Define constants in your settings file, that are then made available in your templates.

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Installation

From the command line:

pip install django-tagconstants

Add tagconstants to your installed apps:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
	...
	'tagconstants',
	...
)

Create a TAG_CONSTANTS dictionary in your settings.py file:

TAG_CONSTANTS = {}

Usage

For security purposes, tagconstants is designed so that you create a whitelist of variables to make available in your templates. For more information see the Design and Security section.

To use a constant in your templates, first add the constant to your TAG_CONSTANTS setting:

TAG_CONSTANTS = {
	'CONSTANT': 'SOME STRING',
}

Then in your templates, you can recall these constants with the {% constant ... %} template tag:

{% load tagconstants %}

{% constant "CONSTANT" %}
    {# renders to 'SOME STRING' #}

{% constant "CONSTANT" as "variable_name" %}
	{# loads the template variable variable_name="SOME STRING" #}
	{# into the template context #}

Design and Security

The settings.py file often holds many highly sensitive bits of information, API keys, secrets, passwords, etc...; so exposing the variables bound in settings.py directly to the templates would be a security mistake. However, the settings.py file still seems like the proper place to include any constants that should available to templates.

Because of these facts, we take the whitelist approach which allows you to maintain security by having to explicitly state what constants are available to templates, but also have the convenience of being able to store site wide constants in your settings.py file.

Contributing

Pull, fork, do whatever you'd like with the code.