Build a Countdown Dashboard with FastAPI and Jinja2 – Your Personal “Moyu Office”

Introduction

In this tutorial I show how to create a simple “Moyu Office” countdown page that displays the current date, weekday and the number of days remaining until various holidays and the weekend.

Implementation Overview

Use FastAPI as the backend framework and Jinja2Templates for dynamic HTML rendering.

Use the zhdate library to convert between Gregorian and lunar calendars for holidays such as Chinese New Year, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid‑Autumn Festival.

Calculate the distance in days for each holiday, handling past dates by adding one year.

Define a helper function get_week_day to map Python weekday numbers to Chinese weekday names.

Collect all distances into a list of dictionaries and sort them by the remaining days.

Expose a single route “/” that renders readme.html with the computed data.

Deploy the application behind Nginx.

Key Code Snippets

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import datetime
from fastapi import FastAPI, Request
from fastapi.responses import HTMLResponse
from fastapi.templating import Jinja2Templates
from zhdate import ZhDate as lunar_date

app = FastAPI(debug=False, title="My API")
templates = Jinja2Templates(directory="templates")
today = datetime.date.today()
# calculate distances ...

def get_week_day(date):
    week_day_dict = {0:"星期一",1:"星期二",2:"星期三",3:"星期四",4:"星期五",5:"星期六",6:"星期天"}
    return week_day_dict[date.weekday()]

@app.get("/", response_class=HTMLResponse)
async def readme(request: Request):
    return templates.TemplateResponse("readme.html", {"request": request, "time_": time_, "now_": now_, "week_day_": week_day_})

The corresponding Jinja2 template loops over time_ and prints each holiday with its remaining days.

{% for v_ in time_ %}
<p>🐟 距离 {{ v_.title }} 放假还有 {{ v_.v_ }} 天</p>
{% else %}
<p>沒有任何值</p>
{% endfor %}

The project source code is hosted at https://github.com/PY-GZKY/moyu.