render_to_response gives TemplateDoesNotExist

Question

I am obtaining the path of template using

paymenthtml = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'template\\payment.html')

and calling it in another application where paymenthtml gets copied to payment_template

return render_to_response(self.payment_template, self.context, RequestContext(self.request))

But I get error

TemplateDoesNotExist at /test-payment-url/

E:\testapp\template\payment.html

Why is the error coming?

Edit : I have made following change in settings.py and it is able to find the template, but i cannot hardcode the path in production, any clue?

TEMPLATE_DIRS = ("E:/testapp" )

Answer 1

i do not have a django here, but i think you should use / instead of \\ ?

python helps you about the slashes across OSes

Answer 2

Are you certain that this file exists on your system?

E:\testapp\template\payment.html

This error message is pretty straightforward and is seen when Django tries to find your template file by path on the file system and cannot see it.

If the file does exist the next step would be to check the permissions on that file and the directories to ensure that this is not a permissions issue. If your E: drive is a mapped network drive of some network share then you also need to check sharing permissions as well.

Answer 3

It seems like Django will only load templates if they're in a directory you define in TEMPLATE_DIRS, even if they exist elsewhere.

Try this in settings.py:

PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
# Other settings...
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, "templates"),
)

and then in the view:

return render_to_response("payment.html", self.context, RequestContext(self.request))
# or
return render_to_response("subdir/payment.html", self.context, RequestContext(self.request))

This would render either E:\path\to\project\templates\payment.html or E:\path\to\project\templates\subdir\payment.html. The point is that they're inside of the directory we specified in settings.py.