Overriding templates

In your project, you might want to override a template in another Django application, whether it be a third-party application or a contrib application such as django.contrib.admin. You can either put template overrides in your project’s templates directory or in an application’s templates directory.

If you have app and project templates directories that both contain overrides, the default Django template loader will try to load the template from the project-level directory first. In other words, DIRS is searched before APP_DIRS.

Overriding from the project’s templates directory

First, we’ll explore overriding templates by creating replacement templates in your project’s templates directory.

Let’s say you’re trying to override the templates for a third-party application called blog, which provides the templates blog/post.html and blog/list.html. The relevant settings for your project would look like:

import os

BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...,
    'blog',
    ...,
]

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
        'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')],
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        ...
    },
]

The TEMPLATES setting and BASE_DIR will already exist if you created your project using the default project template. The setting that needs to be modified is DIRS.

These settings assume you have a templates directory in the root of your project. To override the templates for the blog app, create a folder in the templates directory, and add the template files to that folder:

templates/
    blog/
        list.html
        post.html

The template loader first looks for templates in the DIRS directory. When the views in the blog app ask for the blog/post.html and blog/list.html templates, the loader will return the files you just created.

Overriding from an app’s template directory

Since you’re overriding templates located outside of one of your project’s apps, it’s more common to use the first method and put template overrides in a project’s templates folder. If you prefer, however, it’s also possible to put the overrides in an app’s template directory.

First, make sure your template settings are checking inside app directories:

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        ...,
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        ...
    },
]

If you want to put the template overrides in an app called myapp and the templates to override are named blog/list.html and blog/post.html, then your directory structure will look like:

myapp/
    templates/
        blog/
            list.html
            post.html

With APP_DIRS set to True, the template loader will look in the app’s templates directory and find the templates.

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