Fix Django TemplateSyntaxError

This website uses Django and nginx. It also relies on goaccess to convert nginx logs into html (stay tuned to another blog post ). However, after a recent update of goaccess, Django can't render the html files produced by goaccess any more. A  TemplateSyntaxError will occur as following:

This is because within the html files, there are strings like {{#from}}. If you know Django, they look like Django template variables and I guess this why it doesn't like it. In fact, it reports an "Error during template rendering".

So how do you fix this? Well, instead of using the render function of Django directly, you want to ask python to open the file and return HttpResponse back to browser and it works beautifully, something similar to below.

def log(request):
    if request.user.is_superuser:
        with open(f'dir/to/log.html', 'rb') as f:
            html = f.read()
        return HttpResponse(html)
    
    else:
        return redirect('home')

Notice that only super user is allowed to view this file, for good reasons. Also when the file is opened by python, 'rb' is used rather the more typical "r". "b" for binary. For some unknow reasons, without the "b", sometimes a different error could occur.

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