Using Mako templating language

As of 0.9.5 release, Pylons supports Myghty as a default templating language. This recipe provides instructions on how to use Mako instead of/alongside with Mighty. Text is extracted from the pylons wiki, original author is James Gardner.

Useful Information
Note: Mako is the default from 0.9.6rc1 onwards. Much of the below info is inaccurate for 0.9.6rc1 onwards.

Making Mako the default

First get hold of the latest copy of Mako:

1	easy_install -U Mako

Then change this line in yourproject/config/middleware.py:

1	config.init_app(global_conf, app_conf, package='yourproject')

to this:

1	config.init_app(global_conf, app_conf, package='yourproject', template_engine='mako')

Then you can use the standard render() and render_response() functions as normal and they will use Mako templates instead of Myghty ones.

If your templates are UTF-8 encoded you should set these template options in your environment.py:

tmpl_options = {}
tmpl_options['mako.input_encoding'] = 'UTF-8'
tmpl_options['mako.output_encoding'] = 'UTF-8'
tmpl_options['mako.default_filters'] = ['decode.utf8']

Running Mako and Myghty Together

If you wish to stick with Myghty as your main template engine but use Mako as well you should easy_install Mako as before but add the following to your config/middleware.py file after config.init_app():

1 2	mako_opts = {} config.add_template_engine('mako', 'yourproject.templates', mako_opts)

You can specify any Mako options to the TemplateLookup() class by adding them to mako_opts. For example the following would set the direcetory for storing cached templates to be /tmp/mako_modules:

1	mako_opts = {'mako.module_directory':'/tmp/mako_modules'}

Now that Mako is setup you can use it in your controllers. For example, add a TemplateTest controller:

1	paster controller TemplateTest

then edit it to look like this:

from yourproject.lib.base import *
class TemplatetestController(BaseController):
    def myghty(self):
        return render_response('test.myt', world="World")
    def mako(self):
        return render_response('mako', 'test.html', world="World")

You will also need to add the two templates, templates/test.myt using Myghty should look like this:

1	Hello <% ARGS['world'] %> Myghty!

and templates/test.html using Mako should look like this:

1	Hello ${world} Mako!

You can then view the output by serving the project:

1	paster serve --reload development.ini

and visiting http://localhost:5000/TemplateTest/myghty and http://localhost:5000/TemplateTest/mako

PylonsHQ.

Using Mako templating language

Making Mako the default

Running Mako and Myghty Together

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