How to override and extend basic Django admin templates?

Update:

Read the Docs for your version of Django. e.g.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/ref/contrib/admin/#admin-overriding-templates https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/ref/contrib/admin/#admin-overriding-templates https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/contrib/admin/#admin-overriding-templates

Original answer from 2011:

I had the same issue about a year and a half ago and I found a nice template loader on djangosnippets.org that makes this easy. It allows you to extend a template in a specific app, giving you the ability to create your own admin/index.html that extends the admin/index.html template from the admin app. Like this:

{% extends "admin:admin/index.html" %}

{% block sidebar %}
    {{block.super}}
    <div>
        <h1>Extra links</h1>
        <a href="/admin/extra/">My extra link</a>
    </div>
{% endblock %}

I've given a full example on how to use this template loader in a blog post on my website.

As for Django 1.8 being the current release, there is no need to symlink, copy the admin/templates to your project folder, or install middlewares as suggested by the answers above. Here is what to do:

1. create the following tree structure(recommended by the official documentation)

   your_project
        |-- your_project/
        |-- myapp/
        |-- templates/
             |-- admin/
                 |-- myapp/
                     |-- change_form.html  <- do not misspell this
   

Note: The location of this file is not important. You can put it inside your app and it will still work. As long as its location can be discovered by django. What's more important is the name of the HTML file has to be the same as the original HTML file name provided by django.

2. Add this template path to your settings.py:

   TEMPLATES = [
       {
           'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
           'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')], # <- add this line
           'APP_DIRS': True,
           'OPTIONS': {
               'context_processors': [
                   'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                   'django.template.context_processors.request',
                   'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                   'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
               ],
           },
       },
   ]
   

3. Identify the name and block you want to override. This is done by looking into django's admin/templates directory. I am using virtualenv, so for me, the path is here:

   ~/.virtualenvs/edge/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/templates/admin
   

In this example, I want to modify the add new user form. The template responsiblve for this view is change_form.html. Open up the change_form.html and find the {% block %} that you want to extend.

4. In your change_form.html, write somethings like this:

   {% extends "admin/change_form.html" %}
   {% block field_sets %}
        {# your modification here #}
   {% endblock %}
   

5. Load up your page and you should see the changes

if you need to overwrite the admin/index.html, you can set the index_template parameter of the AdminSite.

e.g.

# urls.py
...
from django.contrib import admin

admin.site.index_template = 'admin/my_custom_index.html'
admin.autodiscover()

and place your template in <appname>/templates/admin/my_custom_index.html

With django 1.5 (at least) you can define the template you want to use for a particular modeladmin

see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/ref/contrib/admin/#custom-template-options

You can do something like

class Myadmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    change_form_template = 'change_form.htm'

With change_form.html being a simple html template extending admin/change_form.html (or not if you want to do it from scratch)

Chengs's answer is correct, howewer according to the admin docs not every admin template can be overwritten this way: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/ref/contrib/admin/#overriding-admin-templates

Templates which may be overridden per app or model

Not every template in contrib/admin/templates/admin may be overridden per app or per model. The following can:

app_index.html
change_form.html
change_list.html
delete_confirmation.html
object_history.html

For those templates that cannot be overridden in this way, you may still override them for your entire project. Just place the new version in your templates/admin directory. This is particularly useful to create custom 404 and 500 pages

I had to overwrite the login.html of the admin and therefore had to put the overwritten template in this folder structure:

your_project
 |-- your_project/
 |-- myapp/
 |-- templates/
      |-- admin/
          |-- login.html  <- do not misspell this

(without the myapp subfolder in the admin) I do not have enough repution for commenting on Cheng's post this is why I had to write this as new answer.