Template Loading

While Chapter 6 showed that when a view or other code requests a template to render, it just passes in a name and a relative path, the actual retrieval of templates is done by special loaders, each of which accesses templates in a different way. By supplying the import paths to one or more of these to the TEMPLATE_LOADERS setting, Django doesn't need to know in advance how or where you'll store your templates.

Django ships with three template loaders, representing the most common ways templates are expected to be used, loading files from the filesystem in certain configurations. When these options aren't enough, it's fairly straightforward to add your own template loader to locate and retrieve templates in whatever way is best for your environment.