Creating email templates with Django

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2809547

Question

I want to send HTML-emails, using Django templates like this:

<html>
<body>
hello <strong>{{username}}</strong>
your account activated.
<img src="mysite.com/logo.gif" />
</body>

I can't find anything about send_mail, and django-mailer only sends HTML templates, without dynamic data.

How do I use Django's template engine to generate e-mails?

Was it helpful?

Solution

From the docs, to send HTML e-mail you want to use alternative content-types, like this:

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives

subject, from_email, to = 'hello', 'from@example.com', 'to@example.com'
text_content = 'This is an important message.'
html_content = '<p>This is an <strong>important</strong> message.</p>'
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, text_content, from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.send()

You'll probably want two templates for your e-mail - a plain text one that looks something like this, stored in your templates directory under email.txt:

Hello {{ username }} - your account is activated.

and an HTMLy one, stored under email.html:

Hello <strong>{{ username }}</strong> - your account is activated.

You can then send an e-mail using both those templates by making use of get_template, like this:

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
from django.template.loader import get_template
from django.template import Context

plaintext = get_template('email.txt')
htmly     = get_template('email.html')

d = Context({ 'username': username })

subject, from_email, to = 'hello', 'from@example.com', 'to@example.com'
text_content = plaintext.render(d)
html_content = htmly.render(d)
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, text_content, from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.send()

OTHER TIPS

Boys and Girls!

Since Django's 1.7 in send_email method the html_message parameter was added.

html_message: If html_message is provided, the resulting email will be a multipart/alternative email with message as the text/plain content type and html_message as the text/html content type.

So you can just:

from django.core.mail import send_mail
from django.template.loader import render_to_string


msg_plain = render_to_string('templates/email.txt', {'some_params': some_params})
msg_html = render_to_string('templates/email.html', {'some_params': some_params})

send_mail(
    'email title',
    msg_plain,
    'some@sender.com',
    ['some@receiver.com'],
    html_message=msg_html,
)

I have made django-templated-email in an effort to solve this problem, inspired by this solution (and the need to, at some point, switch from using django templates to using a mailchimp etc. set of templates for transactional, templated emails for my own project). It is still a work-in-progress though, but for the example above, you would do:

from templated_email import send_templated_mail
send_templated_mail(
        'email',
        'from@example.com',
        ['to@example.com'],
        { 'username':username }
    )

With the addition of the following to settings.py (to complete the example):

TEMPLATED_EMAIL_DJANGO_SUBJECTS = {'email':'hello',}

This will automatically look for templates named 'templated_email/email.txt' and 'templated_email/email.html' for the plain and html parts respectively, in the normal django template dirs/loaders (complaining if it cannot find at least one of those).

Use EmailMultiAlternatives and render_to_string to make use of two alternative templates (one in plain text and one in html):

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
from django.template import Context
from django.template.loader import render_to_string

c = Context({'username': username})    
text_content = render_to_string('mail/email.txt', c)
html_content = render_to_string('mail/email.html', c)

email = EmailMultiAlternatives('Subject', text_content)
email.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
email.to = ['to@example.com']
email.send()

I have created Django Simple Mail to have a simple, customizable and reusable template for every transactional email you would like to send.

Emails contents and templates can be edited directly from django's admin.

With your example, you would register your email :

from simple_mail.mailer import BaseSimpleMail, simple_mailer


class WelcomeMail(BaseSimpleMail):
    email_key = 'welcome'

    def set_context(self, user_id, welcome_link):
        user = User.objects.get(id=user_id)
        return {
            'user': user,
            'welcome_link': welcome_link
        }


simple_mailer.register(WelcomeMail)

And send it this way :

welcome_mail = WelcomeMail()
welcome_mail.set_context(user_id, welcome_link)
welcome_mail.send(to, from_email=None, bcc=[], connection=None, attachments=[],
                   headers={}, cc=[], reply_to=[], fail_silently=False)

I would love to get any feedback.

There is an error in the example.... if you use it as written, the following error occurs:

< type 'exceptions.Exception' >: 'dict' object has no attribute 'render_context'

You will need to add the following import:

from django.template import Context

and change the dictionary to be:

d = Context({ 'username': username })

See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/ref/templates/api/#rendering-a-context

Django Mail Templated is a feature-rich Django application to send emails with Django template system.

Installation:

pip install django-mail-templated

Configuration:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'mail_templated'
)

Template:

{% block subject %}
Hello {{ user.name }}
{% endblock %}

{% block body %}
{{ user.name }}, this is the plain text part.
{% endblock %}

Python:

from mail_templated import send_mail
send_mail('email/hello.tpl', {'user': user}, from_email, [user.email])

More info: https://github.com/artemrizhov/django-mail-templated

I wrote a snippet that allows you to send emails rendered with templates stored in the database. An example:

EmailTemplate.send('expense_notification_to_admin', {
    # context object that email template will be rendered with
    'expense': expense_request,
})

If you want dynamic email templates for your mail then save the email content in your database tables. This is what i saved as HTML code in database = 

<p>Hello.. {{ first_name }} {{ last_name }}.  <br> This is an <strong>important</strong> {{ message }}
<br> <b> By Admin.</b>

 <p style='color:red'> Good Day </p>

In your views: 

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
from django.template.loader import get_template

def dynamic_email(request):
    application_obj = AppDetails.objects.get(id=1)
    subject = 'First Interview Call'
    email = request.user.email
    to_email = application_obj.email
    message = application_obj.message

    text_content = 'This is an important message.'
    d = {'first_name': application_obj.first_name,'message':message}
    htmly = FirstInterviewCall.objects.get(id=1).html_content #this is what i have saved previously in database which i have to send as Email template as mentioned above HTML code

    open("partner/templates/first_interview.html", "w").close() # this is the path of my file partner is the app, Here i am clearing the file content. If file not found it will create one on given path.
    text_file = open("partner/templates/first_interview.html", "w") # opening my file
    text_file.write(htmly) #putting HTML content in file which i saved in DB
    text_file.close() #file close

    htmly = get_template('first_interview.html')
    html_content = htmly.render(d)  
    msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, text_content, email, [to_email])
    msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
    msg.send()

This will send the dynamic HTML template what you have save in Db.

I like using this tool to permit easily to send email HTML and TXT with easy context processing: https://github.com/divio/django-emailit

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