Lots of people use Django templates as part of the Django Web Framework. You can use Django templates as part of your TurboGears project with this step by step guide:

Step 0. Install TurboDjango By SetupTools

TurboDjango Template Plugin

TurboDjango is the TurboGears “Django template” plugin which is developed by Fred Lin, the project is hosted at SourceForge.

To get Django templates to work with TurboGears, first install the plugin by running this command on your console:

$ easy_install TurboDjango

And be sure that you already have Django installed.

Alternative:TurboJinja Template Plugin

You can use the alternative TurboJinja plugin, which allows you to use “Django template”-like syntax without having to install Django. This project is hosted at SourceForge as well.

Install the plugin by running this command on your console:

$ easy_install TurboJinja

The Jinja templating plugin will be installed automatically.

The following guide works for both Template Plugins.

Step 1. Quickstart

Use the tg-admin command to create a new project (‘turbodj‘ in this example):

$ tg-admin quickstart turbodj

Step 2. Edit Controller

Enter your turbodj project directory, edit ‘’/turbodj/controller.py‘’, and add the following method to the “Root” class:

@expose(template = "django:turbodj.templates.djpage")
def page(self):
    return dict(name="TurboGears")

In the expose decorator we use the django: template scheme, with “djpage” as the django template filename (under the templates directory).

Step 3. Edit Template

Edit /turbodj/templates/djpage.html:

<h1>Hello, {{name}}</h1>

The template has an “html” file suffix.

Step 4. Test if it works

In turbodj directory, start the development server by running ‘’start-turbodj’’ script:

$ start-turbodj

Open the browser and enter the url: http://localhost:8080/page. You’ll see:

Hello, TurboGears