renderTemplate in a plugin for front end request using front end template I want to be able to render a template in the main 'templates' directory from within a plugin controller.

Basically the controller gets the url request, does some work and then renders a template saved in the 'craft/templates' directory instead of the 'plugin/templates' directory.

I have tried the plugin path trick mentioned on this page https://craftcms.com/docs/plugins/templates without any success.

Any ideas?
Craft will only serve templates from craft/templates/ by default if it’s a front-end site request.

To explicitly tell Craft to serve templates from there, you can use PathService::setTemplatesPath():

$path = craft()-&gt;path-&gt;getSiteTemplatesPath();
craft()-&gt;path-&gt;setTemplatesPath($path);

$this-&gt;renderTemplate('path/to/template', $variables);