Making Your Own Email Templates in Django

Send to console

To log emails to the console, you just have to set EMAIL_BACKEND in settings.py.

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

Here’s the documentation for reference.

Send via SMTP

There are a few settings you’ll need to take care of if you want to send live SMTP emails:

• EMAIL_BACKEND
• EMAIL_HOST
• EMAIL_PORT
• EMAIL_HOST_USER
• EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD
• EMAIL_USE_TLS or EMAIL_USE_SSL

If you’re ready to give this a try, I would recommend making an account on SendGrid. Even when your free trial expires, you’ll have 100 free emails to send every day. Not enough to run a big project, but plenty of leeway to learn how to use it.

Once you’re signed up, you want to find the “Send Your First Email” instructions to set up SMTP.

Then choose SMTP relay, not Web API.

Then you need to create a SendGrid API key. This will be your EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD in your settings.py file.

After naming and creating your key, step two will autopopulate. These are what you’ll use in your settings.py file. Here’s a link to the SendGrid documentation on exactly how to set it up.

Make sure all the settings outlined at the beginning of this section are set, then you can try to actually send an email.

Sending a plain email

Let’s practice. I’m assuming you have your EMAIL_BACKEND all set up. If you can’t get SMTP working, make it log to console to get the templates working first. It’s much more encouraging than sitting there trying to troubleshoot why SMTP isn’t sending.

# settings.py
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

So for my app, I want to send an email when my UpdateView form is submitted. This will notify the user related to that model object that they should come check it out. So I will override the form_valid() method to send an email when the UpdateView form is submitted.

# app_name/views.py
from django.core.mail import send_mail
from django.views.generic import UpdateView

from .models import ModelName

class ModelNameUpdateView(UpdateView):
  model = ModelName
  fields = ['field_1', 'field_2',]
  template_name = 'app_name/model_name_update.html'

  def form_valid(self, form):
    if request.method.POST:
      from_email = 'me@email.com'
      recipient_list = ['yourpersonalemail@email.com', ]  # put your real email here
      subject = 'Subject text'
      message = 'This is the body of the email.'
      send_mail(subject, message, from_email, recipient_list)
    return super(ModelNameUpdateView, self).form_valid(form)

Update your model with your UpdateView and check your console or inbox (depending on your EMAIL_BACKEND) to see if it worked!

Create templates

We’re going to make three templates:

• app_name/email/model_name_update_email_subject.txt
• app_name/email/model_name_update_email_message.txt
• app_name/email/model_name_update_email_message.html

Make those three files in their respective folders, then move your strings from views.py to each respective template.

app_name/email/model_name_update_email_subject.txt

Subject text

app_name/email/model_name_update_email_message.txt

This is the body of the email.

app_name/email/model_name_update_email_message.html

This is the html body of the email.

Call render_to_string()

Now we move back to views.py where we want to point to these template files.

# app_name/views.py
from django.template.loader import render_to_string  # new
from django.core.mail import send_mail
from django.views.generic import UpdateView

from .models import ModelName

class ModelNameUpdateView(UpdateView):
  model = ModelName
  fields = ['field_1', 'field_2',]
  template_name = 'app_name/model_name_update.html'

  def form_valid(self, form):
    if request.method.POST:
      from_email = 'me@email.com'
      recipient_list = ['yourpersonalemail@email.com', ]  # put your real email here
      subject = render_to_string(
        template_name='app_name/email/model_name_update_email_subject.txt'
      )
      message = render_to_string(
        template_name='app_name/email/model_name_update_email_message.txt'
      )
      html_message = render_to_string(
        template_name='app_name/email/model_name_update_email_message.html'
      )
      send_mail(subject, message, from_email, recipient_list)
    return super(ModelNameUpdateView, self).form_valid(form)

render_to_string() is kind of like the render() function you may have used before, but returns the template as a string instead of an HttpResponse object.

Give that a shot and see if it works… hint: it probably won’t.