Use closure for your Django context processors

The idea with template context processors in Django is to inject some defaults thing to be available when rendering a template that is rendered with a request.

I.e. instead of...:

def view1(request):
    context = {
        'name': 'View 1', 
        'on_dev_server': request.get_host() in settings.DEV_HOSTNAMES
    }
    return render(request, 'view1.html', context)

def view2(request):
    context = {
        'name': 'View 2', 
        'other': 'things', 
        'on_dev_server': request.get_host() in settings.DEV_HOSTNAMES
    }
    return render(request, 'view2.html', context)

And in your nominal templates/base.html you might have something like this:

  ...
  <footer>
  <p>&copy; You 2015</p>
  {% if on_dev_server %}
    <p color="red">Note! We're currently on a dev server!</p>
  {% endif %}
  </footer>
  ...

Instead you do this trick; in your settings.py you write down the list of defaults plus the one you want to always have available:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    "django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth",
    "django.template.context_processors.static",
    "myproject.myapp.context_processors.debug_info",
)

And to accompany that you define your myprojects/myapp/context_processors.py like so:

def debug_info(request):
    return {
        'on_dev_server': request.get_host() in settings.DEV_HOSTNAMES,
    }

So far so good.

However, there's a problem with this. Two problems in fact.

First problem is that when all the templates in your big complicated website renders, it's quite possible that some pages don't need everything you set up in your context processors. That might mean a heck of a lot of extra computation when it won't ever be displayed.

For example, I have a project where most pages have a sidebar where I show "Trending Events" which is something I compute in a context_processors.py function called def sidebar_events(request):. But the sidebar is not always shown and on the pages where it's not shown it's a waste to compute the stuff that sidebar_events computes. Also, I have management pages which uses a totally different base.html template. So there's a big chance you're wasting precious CPU.

Another problem is that of code-readability (aka. how frustrating is this to debug for someone else or yourself after months of idle activity). If you're skimming through your base.html and you see this "random" variable called on_dev_server it's very very hard to tell where the heck that's defined. Hopefully grepping the whole source code is a way to go. A much better way to solve that problem would be sensible namespace naming.

And also, by being too liberal with globally scoped variables there's a chance you might clash from a different piece of functionality that uses the same variable names. That chance is smaller when you use namespaces.

So, to remedy this, let your template context processor functions return closures. It wraps the request automagically.

Let's rewrite our trivial example from above, the context_processors.py should now look like this:

def debug_info(request):
    def inner():
        return {
            'on_dev_server': request.get_host() in settings.DEV_HOSTNAMES,
        }
    return {'debug_info': inner}

Now executing that becomes more optional and more deliberate in the template instead. E.g.

  ...
  <footer>
  <p>&copy; You 2015</p>
  {% set debug_info = debug_info() %}
  {% if debug_info['on_dev_server'] %}
    <p color="red">Note! We're currently on a dev server!</p>
  {% endif %}
  </footer>
  ...

This makes it more explicity which is a good thing. It also has the potential to be avoided if the stuff in there isn't needed in some templates.