Getting started

If you just want to see django-pattern-library up and running, have a look at our online demo.

Installation

django-pattern-library is available on PyPI. First install it in your Django project:

# With pip,
pip install django-pattern-library
# Alternatively, with Poetry,
poetry add --dev django-pattern-library

Compatibility

We support:

• Django 3.2, 4.0, 4.1 (experimental), 4.2 (experimental)
• Python 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11 (experimental)
• Django Templates only, no Jinja support
• Modern “evergreen” desktop and mobile browsers

Configuration

Django settings

In your Django settings file, add pattern_library to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    "pattern_library",
    # ...
]

Also add pattern_library.loader_tags to OPTIONS["builtins"] into the TEMPLATES setting:

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        "BACKEND": "django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates",
        "DIRS": [],
        "APP_DIRS": True,
        "OPTIONS": {
            "context_processors": [
                "django.template.context_processors.debug",
                "django.template.context_processors.request",
                "django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth",
                "django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages",
            ],
            "builtins": [
                "pattern_library.loader_tags"
            ],
        },
    },
]

To see the detailed error pages generated by Django when you have DEBUG = True in the pattern library, you'll need to make sure you have X_FRAME_OPTIONS set, or your browser will block the response:

if DEBUG:
    X_FRAME_OPTIONS = "SAMEORIGIN"

Be careful only to change this when DEBUG = True unless you know what you're doing, you risk making your app less secure otherwise!

Pattern library settings

Still in Django settings, set the PATTERN_LIBRARY setting. Here is an example showing the defaults:

PATTERN_LIBRARY = {
    # Groups of templates for the pattern library navigation. The keys
    # are the group titles and the values are lists of template name prefixes that will
    # be searched to populate the groups.
    "SECTIONS": (
        ("components", ["patterns/components"]),
        ("pages", ["patterns/pages"]),
    ),

    # Configure which files to detect as templates.
    "TEMPLATE_SUFFIX": ".html",

    # Set which template components should be rendered inside of,
    # so they may use page-level component dependencies like CSS.
    "PATTERN_BASE_TEMPLATE_NAME": "patterns/base.html",

    # Any template in BASE_TEMPLATE_NAMES or any template that extends a template in
    # BASE_TEMPLATE_NAMES is a "page" and will be rendered as-is without being wrapped.
    "BASE_TEMPLATE_NAMES": ["patterns/base_page.html"],
}

Note the templates in your PATTERN_LIBRARY settings must be available to template loaders.

URLs

Include pattern_library.urls in your urlpatterns. Here is an example urls.py:

from django.apps import apps
from django.urls import include, path

urlpatterns = [
    # … Your URLs
]

if apps.is_installed("pattern_library"):
    urlpatterns += [
        path("pattern-library/", include("pattern_library.urls")),
    ]

Security

This package isn’t intended for production usage, and hasn’t received extensive security scrutiny.

It is highly recommended to only enable this package in testing environments, for a restricted, trusted audience. One way to do this is to only expose its URLs if apps.is_installed("pattern_library"), as demonstrated above, and only have the app installed in environment-specific settings.

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Alright, now that we got this far, we can navigate to http://localhost:8000/pattern-library/ to see our pattern library! But if we tried to do this now, we would likely get a PatternLibraryEmpty error – this is expected, as we haven’t added any patterns yet.

Now let’s look at adding our first template!

First pattern

Now we’ve done all of the configuration – let’s create a UI component. We’ll use quote-block as an example, and place it at patterns/components/quote_block/quote_block.html inside one of our Django apps:

<blockquote class="quote-block block--spacing">
    <div class="quote-block__text">
        <p class="quote-block__quote">{{ quote }}</p>
        {% if attribution %}
            <p class="quote-block__attribution">{{ attribution }}</p>
        {% endif %}
    </div>
</blockquote>

Base template

We additionally need to customize a base template, so the standalone component can be rendered within a page with CSS. This is what the PATTERN_BASE_TEMPLATE_NAME setting is for. As a separate template in patterns/base.html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <title>My Base</title>
</head>
<body>
  {% block content %}
    {# pattern_library_rendered_pattern is where the pattern library will inject the rendered pattern. #}
    {{ pattern_library_rendered_pattern }}
  {% endblock %}
</body>
</html>

quote_block should now appear in the pattern library UI menu! But the template doesn’t display anything – we additionally need to provide it with test data.

Component data

We can provide context and tags overrides for our new component by creating a quote_block.yaml YAML file alongside the HTML, at patterns/components/quote_block/quote_block.yaml in our example. You can use either .yaml or .yml as the file extension.

context:
  quote: What is love?
  attribution: Haddaway

We could also provide it with a custom name:

name: Quote Block
context:
  quote: What is love?
  attribution: Haddaway

And that’s it! Our quote_block should finally appear in the pattern library, along with its rendering with this mock data.

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Last update: 2024-01-17