# Introduction

Jinja is a fast, expressive, extensible templating engine. Special placeholders in the template allow writing code similar to Python syntax. Then the template is passed data to render the final document.

It includes:

- Template inheritance and inclusion.

- Define and import macros within templates.

- HTML templates can use autoescaping to prevent XSS from untrusted user input.

- A sandboxed environment can safely render untrusted templates.

- Async support for generating templates that automatically handle sync and async functions without extra syntax.

- I18N support with Babel.

- Templates are compiled to optimized Python code just-in-time and cached, or can be compiled ahead-of-time.

- Exceptions point to the correct line in templates to make debugging easier.

- Extensible filters, tests, functions, and even syntax.

Jinja’s philosophy is that while application logic belongs in Python if possible, it shouldn’t make the template designer’s job difficult by restricting functionality too much.

## Installation

We recommend using the latest version of Python. Jinja supports Python 3.6 and newer. We also recommend using a virtual environment in order to isolate your project dependencies from other projects and the system.

Install the most recent Jinja version using pip:

    $ pip install Jinja2

### Dependencies

These will be installed automatically when installing Jinja.

- MarkupSafe escapes untrusted input when rendering templates to avoid injection attacks.

### Optional Dependencies

These distributions will not be installed automatically.

- Babel provides translation support in templates.