Introduction

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to integrate and use Markdown in Django. Very often, we need to process text in Markdown format to output HTML in our Django applications. This can be easily accomplished with the help of a few libraries.

Prerequisites

Before starting this tutorial, make sure that you have Django installed in your development environment. If not, you can install it with pip:

pip install django

Setting up a new Django project

Start by creating a new Django project. Run the following command in your Terminal:

django-admin startproject markdown_project

After creating the project, navigate into the project directory:

cd markdown_project

Installing the required library

To convert Markdown into HTML in Django, we will use the Markdown-deux library. This library will convert our markdown into HTML that can be used in our Django templates. To install Markdown-deux, run the following command in your Terminal:

pip install markdown-deux

Integrating Markdown-deux in Django

After installing Markdown-deux, we need to add it to the list of installed apps in our Django settings. Open the settings.py file and add 'markdown_deux' to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ... other apps
    'markdown_deux',
]

Using Markdown in Django views

Now, we are all set to use Markdown in our Django views. Here’s a basic example:

from django.shortcuts import render
from markdown_deux.templatetags.markdown_deux_tags import markdown_allowed

def post_detail(request, id):
    post = get_object_or_404(Post, id=id)
    content = markdown_allowed(post.content)
    return render(request, 'blog/post_detail.html', {'content': content})

In the example above, we are getting a post by its id, converting the content into HTML with the markdown_allowed function, and passing the converted content into our post_detail.html template.

Using Markdown in Django templates

After converting markdown into HTML in our view, we can use it in our Django template. Open your post_detail.html template and add the following:

<div class="post-content">
    {{ content|safe }}
</div>

We are outputting the content with Django’s safe filter because it’s being treated as safe HTML.

Expected output

If you run your Django server and navigate to your post detail view, you should see your post content rendered as HTML.

Conclusion

That’s how you can use Markdown in Django. Remember, this tutorial only scratches the surface of what you can do with Markdown in Django. For more advanced uses, I recommend checking out the Markdown-deux documentation.

For more information on the Markdown syntax, check out this guide to blockquotes in markdown.

Django is a trademark of the Django Software Foundation.