Override Field Widget Attributes in a Django Form or How To Add Placeholder Attribute to Django Form Input

Let's say we have a contact form and we want to add placeholders to this form inputs so our rendered form has these cool input labels. How do we do that?

My form is a child of ContactForm class provided by the django_contact_form module. The module defines default fields for that form: name, email, and message. We need to add a placeholder attribute in our form class constructor.

In order to edit field widget attributes, we need to use the following code template

self.fields['field_name'].widget.attrs['attribute_name'] = 'attribute_value'

where field_name is a name of our field (email, for example), attribute_name is a name of our attribute (in our case it's a placeholder) and attribute_value is a value we want the attribute to have (in our example it's a label).

Here's the result:

from contact_form.forms import ContactForm

# My form is a child of ContactForm class provided by django_contact_form module
class MyContactForm(ContactForm):

    def __init__(self, data=None, files=None, request=None, recipient_list=None, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(data=data, files=files, request=request, recipient_list=recipient_list,
            *args, **kwargs)
        self.fields['name'].widget.attrs['placeholder'] = 'name'
        self.fields['email'].widget.attrs['placeholder'] = 'e-mail'
        self.fields['body'].widget.attrs['placeholder'] = 'message'

Now you can render the form in a template and you'll see that inputs now have placeholders.

Hope this one was helpful. Till next time.