Context

The template context for each markdown file rendered by coltrane includes:

  • all variables from the markdown frontmatter

  • rendered markdown HTML in content

  • JSON data from the data directory

  • now which provides the current datetime (would be the time of HTML rendering for static site)

  • request which provides the current request for an integrated or standalone site

  • debug which contains the DEBUG setting for an integrated or standalone site (if INTERNAL_IPS has the current request’s IP which is usually 127.0.0.1 for local development)

  • slug which contains the current file’s “slug” (e.g. articles/some-new-article if there was a markdown file at content/articles/some-new-article.md)

  • toc which is an automatically generated table of contents rendered as HTML

coltrane also searches for some special keywords in the frontmatter and applies changes to them if they are found, the currently supported keywords are :

  • publish_date, this is converted to a python datetime instance using the excellent dateparser library, read their docs to see all supported formats.

data/index.json

{ "test": "Great" }

content/index.md

---
this_is_a_variable: This is a good test
template: some_app/custom-template.html
publish_date: 2022-02-26 10:26:02
---

{{ this_is_a_variable }}

Data from JSON files: {{ data.index.test }}

Current datetime: {{ now }}

Publish date: {{ publish_date|naturalday }}

some_app/templates/some_app/custom-template.html

{{ content }}

Generated index.html

<p>This is a good test</p>

<p>Data from JSON files: Great</p>

<p>Current datetime: 8 Jan. 11, 2022, 10:02 p.m.</p>

<p>Publish date: Feb. 26, 2022</p>