Admin Breaks When Using Jinja2 - jinja2

Question

For some reason my wagtail admin interface is breaking when I try and use Jinja2 as my template engine instead of Django Template Engine. My frontend works just fine, it finds my templates in app/jinja2. This is a Django project with wagtail added on.
Here is the error that I am getting when trying to access /admin,
TemplateDoesNotExist at /admin/wagtailadmin/home.html
Request Method: GET
Request URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/
Django Version: 1.11
Exception Type: TemplateDoesNotExist
Exception Value: wagtailadmin/home.html
Exception Location: /Users/dbroadlick/Desktop/projects/codero2/virtualenv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/template/loader.py in get_template, line 25
Python Executable: /Users/dbroadlick/Desktop/projects/codero2/virtualenv/bin/python
Python Version: 3.6.1
Python Path: ['/Users/dbroadlick/Desktop/projects/codero2',
'/Users/dbroadlick/Desktop/projects/codero2/virtualenv/lib/python36.zip',
'/Users/dbroadlick/Desktop/projects/codero2/virtualenv/lib/python3.6',
'/Users/dbroadlick/Desktop/projects/codero2/virtualenv/lib/python3.6/lib-dynload',
'/Users/dbroadlick/Desktop/projects/codero2/virtualenv/lib/python3.6/site-packages']
Server time: Mon, 24 Jul 2017 21:40:59 +0000
Here is what my template configuration looks like,
TEMPLATES = [
{
'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.jinja2.Jinja2',
'APP_DIRS': True,
'OPTIONS': {
'extensions': [
'wagtail.wagtailcore.jinja2tags.core',
'wagtail.wagtailadmin.jinja2tags.userbar',
'wagtail.wagtailimages.jinja2tags.images',
],
'context_processors': [
'django.template.context_processors.debug',
'django.template.context_processors.request',
'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
],
},
},
]
It also says it is trying to use the jinja2 engine which it should not because wagtail admin is programmed using Django templates.

Answer 1

Your TEMPLATES setting has Jinja2 configured as the only available template engine, so there's nothing to trigger the 'traditional' Django Template engine behaviour that the Wagtail admin relies on (namely: to look inside each app's /template folder for the requested template path wagtailadmin/home.html). As a result, the template never gets found. You need to include configurations for both Jinja2 and DjangoTemplates in your TEMPLATES setting - something like:
TEMPLATES = [
{
'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
'DIRS': [],
'APP_DIRS': True,
'OPTIONS': {
'context_processors': [
'django.template.context_processors.debug',
'django.template.context_processors.request',
'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
],
},
},
{
'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.jinja2.Jinja2',
'APP_DIRS': True,
'OPTIONS': {
'extensions': [
'wagtail.wagtailcore.jinja2tags.core',
'wagtail.wagtailadmin.jinja2tags.userbar',
'wagtail.wagtailimages.jinja2tags.images',
],
'context_processors': [
'django.template.context_processors.debug',
'django.template.context_processors.request',
'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
],
},
},
]
Note that you'll need to have some convention in place to tell Django which templates should be rendered with which engine - with the above configuration, I believe that putting your Jinja2 templates inside some_app/jinja2/ rather than some_app/templates/ should take care of that.