258

I am trying to render the file home.html. The file exists in my project, but I keep getting jinja2.exceptions.TemplateNotFound: home.html when I try to render it. Why can't Flask find my template?

from flask import Flask, render_template

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def home():
    return render_template('home.html')
/myproject
    app.py
    home.html
0

19 Answers 19

445

You must create your template files in the correct location; in the templates subdirectory next to the python module (== the module where you create your Flask app).

The error indicates that there is no home.html file in the templates/ directory. Make sure you created that directory in the same directory as your python module, and that you did in fact put a home.html file in that subdirectory. If your app is a package, the templates folder should be created inside the package.

myproject/
    app.py
    templates/
        home.html
myproject/
    mypackage/
        __init__.py
        templates/
            home.html

Alternatively, if you named your templates folder something other than templates and don't want to rename it to the default, you can tell Flask to use that other directory.

app = Flask(__name__, template_folder='template')  # still relative to module

You can ask Flask to explain how it tried to find a given template, by setting the EXPLAIN_TEMPLATE_LOADING option to True. For every template loaded, you'll get a report logged to the Flask app.logger, at level INFO.

This is what it looks like when a search is successful; in this example the foo/bar.html template extends the base.html template, so there are two searches:

[2019-06-15 16:03:39,197] INFO in debughelpers: Locating template "foo/bar.html":
    1: trying loader of application "flaskpackagename"
       class: jinja2.loaders.FileSystemLoader
       encoding: 'utf-8'
       followlinks: False
       searchpath:
         - /.../project/flaskpackagename/templates
       -> found ('/.../project/flaskpackagename/templates/foo/bar.html')
[2019-06-15 16:03:39,203] INFO in debughelpers: Locating template "base.html":
    1: trying loader of application "flaskpackagename"
       class: jinja2.loaders.FileSystemLoader
       encoding: 'utf-8'
       followlinks: False
       searchpath:
         - /.../project/flaskpackagename/templates
       -> found ('/.../project/flaskpackagename/templates/base.html')

Blueprints can register their own template directories too, but this is not a requirement if you are using blueprints to make it easier to split a larger project across logical units. The main Flask app template directory is always searched first even when using additional paths per blueprint.

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2 Comments

Seems like my local flask (on Windows) can find templates inside ./Templates/index.html, but when I deploy to heroku (thought it was same Python, same library versions, including same Flask version; but heroku is Unix); and throws TemplateNotFound error; after I renamed the folder git mv Templates/index.html templates/index.html, both local (Windows) and heroku (Unix) versions worked
@TheRedPea yes, because the Windows filesystem folds case so Templates == templates. But Heroku runs Linux, with a case sensitive filesystem.
46

I think Flask uses the directory templates by default. So your code should be like this

suppose this is your hello.py

from flask import Flask,render_template

app=Flask(__name__,template_folder='template')


@app.route("/")
def home():
    return render_template('home.html')

@app.route("/about/")
def about():
    return render_template('about.html')

if __name__=="__main__":
    app.run(debug=True)

And you work space structure like

project/
    hello.py        
    templates/
         home.html
         about.html    
    static/
           js/
             main.js
           css/
               main.css

Also, you have to create two html files with name of home.html and about.html and put those files in templates folder.

3 Comments

This was totally unexpected that the default is a folder called templates. fixed it for me, will have to be wary of unhelpful defaults.
folder name is 'templates' not 'template'.
this fix my issue, to rename folder to "templates". Also, on pyCharm preference, I set the template language to "jinja2".
25

We simply need to look in the appropriate level of the project directory hierarchy. The takeaway is to understand your own project structure.

for example..

    app = Flask(__name__, template_folder='../templates')
    app = Flask(__name__, template_folder='../templates', static_folder='../static')

Starting with ../ moves one directory backwards and starts there.

Starting with ../../ moves two directories backwards and starts there (and so on...).

or Within a sub-directory... (working into the directory tree)

template_folder='templates/some_template/nested_directory/nested_file.py'

Comments

7

I don't know why, but I had to use the following folder structure instead. I put "templates" one level up.

project/
    app/
        hello.py
        static/
            main.css
    templates/
        home.html
    venv/

This probably indicates a misconfiguration elsewhere, but I couldn't figure out what that was and this worked.

2 Comments

You sure you have app = Flask(__name__)?
I don’t see an __init__.py file inside app/ either.
4

If you run your code from an installed package, make sure template files are present in directory <python root>/lib/site-packages/your-package/templates.


Some details:

In my case I was trying to run examples of project flask_simple_ui and jinja would always say

jinja2.exceptions.TemplateNotFound: form.html

The trick was that sample program would import installed package flask_simple_ui. And ninja being used from inside that package is using as root directory for lookup the package path, in my case ...python/lib/site-packages/flask_simple_ui, instead of os.getcwd() as one would expect.

To my bad luck, setup.py has a bug and doesn't copy any html files, including the missing form.html. Once I fixed setup.py, the problem with TemplateNotFound vanished.

I hope it helps someone.

Comments

4

if anyone running first time your python code and if u create a html file and python file in same directory of top level app = Flask(__name__, template_folder='') this will work

Comments

3

Check that:

  1. the template file has the right name
  2. the template file is in a subdirectory called templates
  3. the name you pass to render_template is relative to the template directory (index.html would be directly in the templates directory, auth/login.html would be under the auth directory in the templates directory.)
  4. you either do not have a subdirectory with the same name as your app, or the templates directory is inside that subdir.

If that doesn't work, turn on debugging (app.debug = True) which might help figure out what's wrong.

Comments

3

I had the same error turns out the only thing i did wrong was to name my 'templates' folder,'template' without 's'. After changing that it worked fine,dont know why its a thing but it is.

Comments

3

pycharm screenshot

No change is needed just put index.html file inside the templates folder.

Comments

2

You need to put all you .html files in the template folder next to your python module. And if there are any images that you are using in your html files then you need put all your files in the folder named static

In the following Structure

project/
    hello.py
    static/
        image.jpg
        style.css
    templates/
        homepage.html
    virtual/
        filename.json

Comments

2

When render_template() function is used it tries to search for template in the folder called templates and it throws error jinja2.exceptions.TemplateNotFound when :

  1. the file does not exist or
  2. the templates folder does not exist

Create a folder with name templates in the same directory where the python file is located and place the html file created in the templates folder.

Comments

2

After lots of work around, I got solution from this post only, Link to the solution post

Add full path to template_folder parameter

app = Flask(__name__,
        template_folder='/home/project/templates/'
        )

Comments

2

My solution is for who has set the flask app Name

from flask import Flask, render_template

app = Flask('MATH') # <---- the name should be different from project folder name. For example uppercase

@app.route('/')

It's very important to put flask instance name different from project directory name. For example 'math1' or 'Math' or 'MATH'

project tree:

/math/
  app.py
  templates/
    hello.html

Comments

1

Another alternative is to set the root_path which fixes the problem both for templates and static folders.

root_path = Path(sys.executable).parent if getattr(sys, 'frozen', False) else Path(__file__).parent
app = Flask(__name__.split('.')[0], root_path=root_path)

If you render templates directly via Jinja2, then you write:

ENV = jinja2.Environment(loader=jinja2.FileSystemLoader(str(root_path / 'templates')))
template = ENV.get_template(your_template_name)

Comments

0

My problem was that the file I was referencing from inside my home.html was a .j2 instead of a .html, and when I changed it back jinja could read it.

Stupid error but it might help someone.

Comments

0

Mine was a silly mistake. I put templates in the pass, like so:

    return render_template('./templates/index.html')

HOWEVER, you simply just have to give the pass relative to the templates directory, that is:

    return render_template('./index.html')

Comments

0

side answer, in my case error was string 'main'

app = Flask('__main__', template_folder='templates')

this some how 'main' make the config for different app so thats why the original app not able to find templates when change back to __name__ it worked

app = Flask(__name__, template_folder='templates')

[as documentation says about name][1]

The first argument is the name of the application’s module or package. If you are using a single module (as in this example), you should use name because depending on if it’s started as application or imported as module the name will be different ('main' versus the actual import name).

[1]: https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/1.1.x/quickstart/#:~:text=The%20first%20argument%20is%20the,versus%20the%20actual%20import%20name).

Comments

-1

I had the same issue recently. I wanted to "--onefile exe" my Python scripts with pyinstaller, but the jinja2 template used was not available: "jinja2.exceptions.TemplateNotFound"

But first here is what helped:
pyinstaller --clean --onefile --windowed --add-data "..\templates*;templates." --splash ..\img\splash2.png ..\main.py

And the code where you load the jinja template itself:

template_loader = ''
if getattr(sys, 'frozen', False):
    # for the case of running in pyInstaller's exe
    bundle_dir = sys._MEIPASS
    logging.info(bundle_dir)
    template_loader = jinja2.FileSystemLoader(
        path.join(bundle_dir, 'templates'))
else:
    # for running locally
    template_loader = jinja2.FileSystemLoader(searchpath="./templates")

template_env = jinja2.Environment(loader=template_loader)
template = template_env.get_template('template_configuration_file.txt')
filled_template = template.render(columns=columns)

with open(output_path, "w") as fh:
    fh.write(filled_template)

Now to the whys.

First: If you use "--onefile" flag, pyinstaller will create a single .exe file. When you run it, the operating system will extract the files to a temporary MEIPASS folder under your personal account. That's why we need to differentiate between "if getattr(sys, 'frozen', False):" and running the script the "normal way" (as sown in the code snippet).

Second: Jinja normally ignores *.txt files, therefore I have also seen some suggestions to create a fake python file to fool the pyInstaller. There is no need to do this, just set the flag "--add-data origin;destination" (here I add all the files in the template folder also to the template folder but in the destination directory). You will need to use ":" instead of ";" as delimiter for unix systems.

Thirdly, I ran into a bug where the templates wouldn't be added even though I set the "--add-data" flag. An additional "--clean" flag helped here!

Hopefully it will help save debugging time :-)

Comments

-2

Another explanation I've figured out for myself When you create the Flask application, the folder where templates is looked for is the folder of the application according to name you've provided to Flask constructor:

app = Flask(__name__)

The __name__ here is the name of the module where application is running. So the appropriate folder will become the root one for folders search.

projects/
    yourproject/
        app/
            templates/

So if you provide instead some random name the root folder for the search will be current folder.

Comments

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