Blank page through Mako template rendering in python / cherrypy

So it finally seems that I could get Mako to work. At least everything done in the console works. Now I tried to render my index.html with Mako and all I get is a blank page. This is the module I call:

    def index(self):
    mytemplate = Template(
                    filename='index.html'
                )   
    return mytemplate.render()

The html is this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Title</title>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
</head>
<body>
<p>This is a test!</p>
<p>Hello, my age is ${30 - 2}.</p>
</body>
</html>

So when I call 192.168.0.1:8081/index (this is the local server setup I run) it starts the function, but the result in my browser is a blank page.

Do I understand Mako correctly or did I miss something?

Solution

In basic usage everything is quite simple, and well documented. Just provide correct paths to the engine.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-


import os

import cherrypy
from mako.lookup import TemplateLookup
from mako.template import Template


path   = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
config = {
  'global' : {
    'server.socket_host' : '127.0.0.1',
    'server.socket_port' : 8080,
    'server.thread_pool' : 8
  }
}


lookup = TemplateLookup(directories=[os.path.join(path, 'view')])


class App:

  @cherrypy.expose
  def index(self):
    template = lookup.get_template('index.html')
    return template.render(foo = 'bar')

  @cherrypy.expose  
  def directly(self):
    template = Template(filename = os.path.join(path, 'view', 'index.html'))
    return template.render(foo = 'bar')



if __name__ == '__main__':
  cherrypy.quickstart(App(), '/', config)

Along the Python file, create view directory and put the following under index.html.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Title</title>
  <meta charset="UTF-8" />
</head>
<body>
  <p>This is a ${foo} test!</p>
  <p>Hello, my age is ${30 - 2}.</p>
</body>
</html>