TemplateFinder

TemplateFinder is an extension of TemplateView which attempts to load the corresponding templates directly from URLs, without the need to write a view for each URL.

It can load HTML templates directly, or parse Markdown files that contain a "wrapper_template" frontmatter key.

Usage

To register the template finder in your Flask app you need to register the template folder in the application config, and specify which routes should be handled by it. The following example will handle everything via the templatefinder:

from canonicalwebteam.templatefinder import TemplateFinder

TEMPLATE_FOLDER = 

app = Flask(
    template_folder="templates",
    static_folder="static",
)
app.config["TEMPLATE_FOLDER"] = "templates"

template_finder_view = TemplateFinder.as_view("template_finder")
app.add_url_rule("/", view_fun  c=template_finder_view)
app.add_url_rule("/<path:subpath>", view_func=template_finder_view)

Template matching

The templatefinder can be used to automatically map .html and .md files to url on a website. When included the finder will search for files at the given url in a specified template directory.

E.g. localhost/pages/test will look for the following files, in order:

• $TEMPLATE_FOLDER/pages/test.html
• $TEMPLATE_FOLDER/pages/test/index.html
• $TEMPLATE_FOLDER/pages/test.md
• $TEMPLATE_FOLDER/pages/test/index.md

Markdown parsing

If the TemplateFinder encounters a Markdown file (ending .md) it will look for the following keys in YAML frontmatter:

• wrapper_template mandatory: (e.g.: wrapper_template: includes/markdown-wrapper.html) A path to an HTML template within which to place the parsed markdown content. This path must be relative to Flask's template_folder root.
• context optional: (e.g.: context: {title: "Welcome", description: "A welcome page"}) A dictionary of extra key / value pairs to pass through to the template context.
• markdown_includes optional: (e.g.: markdown_includes: {nav: }) A mapping of key names to template paths pointing to Markdown files to include. Each template path will be parsed, the resulting HTML will be passed in the template context, under the relevant key. Paths must be relative to Flask's template_folder root.

Here's an example Markdown file:

---
wrapper_template: "includes/markdown-wrapper.html"
markdown_includes:
  nav: "includes/nav.md"
context:
  title: "Welcome"
  description: "A welcome page"
---

Welcome to my website.

## GitHub

I also have [a GitHub page](https://github.com/me).

Tests

Tests can be run with pytest:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt
python3 -m pytest test