Jinja2 is one of the most used template engines for Python.

generate-html-with-python-jinja2.md

Jinja2 is one of the most used template engines for Python. It is inspired by Django's templating system but extends it with an expressive language that gives template authors a more powerful set of tools. On top of that it adds sandboxed execution and optional automatic escaping for applications where security is important.

Installing

Usually this is done inside a python virtualenv.

$ pip install jinja2

Usage

Every time though I have to spend some time figuring out how to lay out my files and how to load the template. So here is an example that you can also use as a skeleton for your next application.

.
├── run.py
├── html
│   └── index.html
└── templates
    └── index.html

run.py

from jinja2 import Environment, FileSystemLoader
import os
 
root = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
templates_dir = os.path.join(root, 'templates')
env = Environment( loader = FileSystemLoader(templates_dir) )
template = env.get_template('index.html')
 
 
filename = os.path.join(root, 'html', 'index.html')
with open(filename, 'w') as fh:
    fh.write(template.render(
        h1 = "Hello Jinja2",
        show_one = True,
        show_two = False,
        names    = ["Foo", "Bar", "Qux"],
    ))

templates/index.html

<h1>{{ h1 }}</h1>
 
{% if show_one %}
  <h2>one</h2>
{% endif %}
 
{% if show_two %}
  <h2>two</h2>
{% endif %}
 
<ul>
{% for name in names %}
   <li>{{ name }}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

Output

When run.py is executed html/index.html will have the following contents.

<h1>Hello Jinja2</h1>
  <h2>one</h2>
<ul>
   <li>Foo</li>
   <li>Bar</li>
   <li>Qux</li>
</ul>