I have a good many class based views that use reverse(name, args) to find urls and pass this to templates. However, the problem is class based views must be instantiated before urlpatterns can be defined. This means the class is instantiated while urlpatterns is empty leading to reverse throwing errors. I've been working around this by passing lambda: reverse(name, args) to my templates but surely there is a better solution. As a simple example the following fails with exception: ImproperlyConfigured at xxxx The included urlconf mysite.urls doesn't have any patterns in it mysite.urls from mysite.views import MyClassView urlpatterns = patterns('', url(r'^$' MyClassView.as_view(), name='home') ) views.py class MyClassView(View): def get(self, request): home_url = reverse('home') return render_to_response('home.html', {'home_url':home_url}, context_instance=RequestContext(request)) home.html <p><a href={{ home_url }}>Home</a></p> I'm currently working around the problem by forcing reverse to run on template rendering by changing views.py to class MyClassView(View): def get(self, request): home_url = lambda: reverse('home') return render_to_response('home.html', {'home_url':home_url}, context_instance=RequestContext(request)) and it works, but this is really ugly and surely there is a better way. So is there a way to use reverse in class based views but avoid the cyclic dependency of urlpatterns requiring view requiring reverse requiring urlpatterns...