How to debug when not working

[jefftriplett]

I tried out django-cotton using the quickstart docs yesterday on Django 5.1.

While I could verify that everything was installed, I spent an hour trying to figure out why it wouldn't work. There weren't any errors, but the trees demo never updated. I'm not sure what I was doing wrong and I had a half dozen people look over my shoulder (I hold Friday office hours) and we tried out various settings and none of them could figure it out.

Do you have any logging or other tips for what a common gotcha might be for a fairly vanilla Django app?

[wrabit]

Hi @jefftriplett, if you see the <c-* tags still in the source code then that will tell us that something didn't reach the cotton loader. Are you using the auto setup route? (specifying just django_cotton in INSTALLED_APPS)

[wrabit]

@jefftriplett using your TEMPLATES block worked for me (removing the uninstalled items, tailwind, opengraph etc) and using django_cotton.apps.SimpleAppConfig in the INSTALLED_APPS.

[jefftriplett]

@wrabit AHHHH found it. I tried this before, but I'm using django-template-partials and everything just worked after I removed it from INSTALLED_APPS.

I didn't realize they both couldn't be used together.

Thank you for the help.

[wrabit]

@jefftriplett Glad you sussed it, you can use cotton with template partials but you have to set them both to the SimpleAppConfig, in addition - I in fact missed something in the terminal when testing your config and missed something obvious which is app_dirs must not be set when loaders is defined.. So you have to set APP_DIRS to False when modifying the loaders key.

[jefftriplett]

That's great to know. I'll fiddle more with, but I'm happy this is working. I have a bunch of cards I want to support on a few Django websites (DjangoTV and Django News Jobs), so this really helps me scratch an itch. Thanks again!

For anyone else who stumbled on this, when you use django_cotton and template_partials together, you have to use their SimpleAppConfig's so they will work together.

INSTALLED_APPS += [
    "django_cotton.apps.SimpleAppConfig",
    ...
    "template_partials.apps.SimpleAppConfig",
]

And this is in the docs which I totally missed. 🤦

https://django-cotton.com/docs/django-template-partials

[carltongibson]

you have to set them both to the SimpleAppConfig

Yes! Otherwise they clobber each other's changes to the TEMPLATES config (which they make to be easy to get running individually).

Good one.