[Django]-How to return a static HTML file as a response in Django?

If your file isn’t a django template but a plain html file, this is the easiest way:

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

def index (request):
    return render_to_response('app/index.html')

UPDATE 10/13/2020:

render_to_response was deprecated in Django 2.0 and removed in 3.0, so the current way of doing this is:

from django.shortcuts import render

def index (request):
    return render(request, 'app/index.html')

If your CSS and JS files are static don’t use Django to serve them, or serve them as static files

For your html you could do the same if it is just some fixed file that won’t have any dynamic content. You could also use generic views with the TemplateView, just add a line like this to your urls.py:

    url(r'^path/to/url', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='index.html')),

By using HttpResponse you can send data only, if you want to html file then you have to use render or render_to_response by following ways…

from django.shortcuts import render

def index(request):    
    return render(request, 'app/index.html')

or

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

def index (request):
    return render_to_response('app/index.html')

First, you need to do some settings for templating:

Create “templates” folder in the root directory, where manage.py is located after you created your project.
Then go to settings.py , in the TEMPLATES section enter the directory of templates folder. Hard coding is not recommended because if you send your project to your friend, your friend won’t be able to run it. Should be like this:

TEMPLATES = [
 {
        'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
        'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR,"templates")],
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        'OPTIONS': {
            'context_processors': [
                'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                'django.template.context_processors.request',
                'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
            ],
        },
    },
]

Assuming that you have home.html and about.html have in templates folder:

urls.py

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('about/',views.aboutview),
    path('',views.homeview),
]

views.py

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.shortcuts import render

def aboutview(request):
  return render(request,"home.html")
def homeview(request):
  return render(request,"about.html")

from django.http import HttpResponse

from django.template import loader

def index(request):

    template=loader.get_template('app/index.html')

    return HttpResponse(template)