How to render the HTML of a django CMS plugin by id from Python

Question

My use case is the need to render a pdf out of the given plugin, although that function might also be used for eg search index composition.

Answer 1

In the django CMS codebase there's cms.templatetags.render_alias_plugin which code isn't straightforward, but when stripped out it can look as following:

def render_plugin(plugin: CMSPlugin, request: HttpRequest) -> str:
    plugins = plugin.get_descendants().order_by('placeholder', 'path')
    plugins = [plugin] + list(plugins)
    plugins = downcast_plugins(plugins, request=request)
    plugins = list(plugins)
    plugins[0].parent_id = None
    plugins = build_plugin_tree(plugins)
    renderer = get_toolbar_from_request(request).content_renderer
    html: str = renderer.render_plugin(
        instance=plugins[0],
        context={'request': request},
        editable=False,
    )
    return mark_safe(html)


cms_plugin = CMSPlugin.objects.get(id=cms_plugin_id)
render_plugin(cms_plugin, request)

If needed the http request can also be faked, an example of that can be found here.