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up vote 256 down vote favorite
88

I'm experimenting with building an entire web application using Node.js. Is there a template engine similar to (for example) the Django template engine or the like that at least allows you to extend base templates?

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closed as not constructive by Will Nov 28 '12 at 14:18

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.
15  
I just found out that JavaScript V8 engine is faster than Ruby, PHP, and Python. Amazingly fast for a dynamic language. Slower than Java and C#, though. – Nosredna Nov 24 '09 at 19:10
73  
@Nosredna: How can Java possibly be faster than anything?! ;) – Daniel Sloof Sep 8 '10 at 7:06
26  
@Daniel Java is actually pretty fast these days, beating everything but Ada, C and C++ in Debian's Shootout benchmarks. – Mentalikryst Oct 19 '10 at 20:49
19  
Anyone who doesn't care about syntax, productivity and anything else but performance, should be using Raphters (web framework for C) – Pablo B. Apr 17 '11 at 0:27
5  
node.js is not about the language. It's totally about the design and the way js handles IO, which is brilliant. You could make ruby web frameworks run fast if you redesigned it's IO libraries. – julkiewicz Apr 25 '11 at 20:11

21 Answers 21

up vote 162 down vote

Check out the Node js modules wiki page. They have listed all the templating engines supporting node.js.

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Excellent link.. – Dilip Rajkumar Nov 28 '12 at 9:14
5  
The page became deprecated you can find an alternative page on Visionmedia's wiki and the chapter about templates. – Thomas Potaire Mar 1 '14 at 1:44
    
@ThomasPotaire It became deprecated because they suggest to use npm search instead. – inf3rno Jun 12 '15 at 14:47
up vote 51 down vote

You should be able to use mustache.js, if it doesn't work send me the issues and I'll get it fixed because I'm about to be using them in node.js anyway.

http://github.com/janl/mustache.js

I know that it works without a DOM because a bunch of CouchDB standalone apps are using it in a Spidermonkey view server.

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3  
There is also a blog post about using Mustache and Underscore together with Node.js: boldr.net/create-a-web-app-with-node – MKroehnert Apr 25 '10 at 23:53
up vote 40 down vote

If you like haml, but want something even better check out http://jade-lang.com for node, I wrote haml.js as well :)

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4  
Jade is pretty cool. I've just started using it, so can't speak to it's performance, but I like the syntax. And built-in support in Express is a plus. – broofa Nov 22 '10 at 13:41
3  
the performance is sufficient, templates should be cached anyway. Plus remember to scale horizontally, not vertically, otherwise you might as well not use a template engine at all and just some functions / concats – tjholowaychuk Jan 28 '11 at 20:10
up vote 15 down vote

There are new templating engines all the time.

underscore.js adds a lot of functional programming support to js, and has templating.

And just today I heard about this: http://github.com/SamuraiJack/Shotenjin-Joosed

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6  
Thumbs up for underscore.js. Awesome library, I use it both for my client side as well as node.js work. Their templating engine is based on John Resig's JS Micro Templating engine (ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating) which I have used many times before. Afaik its your best option at this point when working with node.js. – felixge Nov 28 '09 at 11:36
2  
Do any of these support inheritance? – Nick Retallack Jan 4 '10 at 5:55
1  
@Nick jinjs seems to support inheritance, see the first line: github.com/ravelsoft/node-jinjs/blob/master/test/templates/… – panchicore Sep 16 '11 at 14:11
    
Page not found.. – hyip Feb 4 at 17:16
up vote 13 down vote

You should take a look at node-asyncEJS, which is explicitly designed to take the asynchronous nature of node.js into account. It even allows async code blocks inside of the template.

Here an example form the documentation:

<html>
  <head>
    <% ctx.hello = "World";  %>
    <title><%= "Hello " + ctx.hello %></title>
  </head>
  <body>

    <h1><%? setTimeout(function () { res.print("Async Header"); res.finish(); }, 2000)  %></h1>
    <p><%? setTimeout(function () { res.print("Body"); res.finish(); }, 1000)  %></p>

  </body>
</html>
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up vote 7 down vote

You can try beardless (it's inspired by weld/plates):

For example:

{ post:
  { title: "Next generation templating: Start shaving!"
  , text: "TL;DR You should really check out beardless!"
  , comments:
    [ {text: "Hey cool!"}
    , {text: "Really gotta check that out..."}  ]
  }
}

Your template:

<h1 data-template="post.title"></h1>
<p data-template="post.text"></p>
<div>
  <div data-template="post.comments" class="comment">
    <p data-template="post.comments.text"></p>
  </div>
</div>

Output:

<h1>Next generation templating: Start shaving!</h1>
<p>TL;DR You should really check out beardless!</p>
<div>
  <div class="comment">
    <p>Hey cool!</p>
  </div>
  <div class="comment">
    <p>Really gotta check that out...</p>
  </div>
</div>
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Please be more descriptive in your answer about your code and the link you referred to. Refer:How to Answer – askmish Oct 21 '12 at 15:39
    
Would be interesting, how to actually process the file or populate variables within Node – Julian F. Weinert Jun 13 '15 at 12:09
up vote 6 down vote

I have done some work on a pretty complete port of the Django template language for Simon Willisons djangode project (Utilities functions for node.js that borrow some useful concepts from Django).

See the documentation here.

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up vote 6 down vote

I use Twig with Symfony and am now dabbling in node.js, so I'm looking at https://github.com/justjohn/twig.js and https://github.com/paularmstrong/swig, which you'll probably like if you use django.

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2  
TwigJS is kind of dead, GitHub says last commit was2years ago. Swig, on he other hand, is pretty acive. I'd go for Swig. – Darkhogg May 10 '13 at 8:21
    
FYI: As of this commit on Jun 25th 2015, the Swig github claims it is no longer being maintained. That might change in the future, but as of now, it's something to consider. – radiovisual Aug 17 '15 at 12:39
up vote 5 down vote

If you're looking for a minimalist approach to templates, you can check out JSON Template.

A more full-featured alternative is EJS. It's a bit more similar to something you'd get from Django.

Your mileage may vary for each of these - they're designed for a browser Javascript environment, and not Node.js.

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2  
It's not similar to Django's templates at all, for one Django's templates have good documentation. EJS is a struggle to get through and you'll end up reading its source code just to understand what's available to you. – Rudolf Olah Jan 20 '14 at 4:27
up vote 5 down vote

WARNING : JinJs is not maintained anymore. It is still working but not compatible with the lastest version of express.

You could try using jinjs. It is a port of the Jinja, a very good Python templating system. You can install it with npm like this :

npm install jinjs

in template.tpl :

I say : "{{ sentence }}"

in your template.js :

jinjs = require('jinjs');
jinjs.registerExtension('.tpl');
tpl = require('./template');
str = tpl.render ({sentence : 'Hello, World!'});
console.log(str);

The output will be :

I say : "Hello, World!"

We are actively developing it, a good documentation should come pretty soon.

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up vote 4 down vote

I've heard good things about {dust} http://akdubya.github.com/dustjs/#dust

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up vote 4 down vote

Try "vash" - asp.net mvc like razor syntax for node.js

https://github.com/kirbysayshi/Vash

also checkout: http://haacked.com/archive/2011/01/06/razor-syntax-quick-reference.aspx

// sample
var tmpl = vash.compile('<hr/>@model.a,@model.b<hr/>');
var html = tmpl({"a": "hello", "b": "world"});
res.write(html);
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1  
Thanks for the Vash shoutout! – Andrew Apr 23 '12 at 17:59
up vote 3 down vote

Google's Closure Templates is a natively-JavaScript templating system and a seemingly natural fit with NodeJS. Here are some instructions for integrating them.

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up vote 3 down vote

haml is a good choice for node.js

http://github.com/creationix/haml-js

haml-js

!!! XML
!!! strict
%html{ xmlns: "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" }
  %head
    %title Sample haml template
  %body
    .profile
      .left.column
        #date= print_date()
        #address= current_user.address
      .right.column
        #email= current_user.email
        #bio= current_user.bio

html

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Sample haml template
</title></head><body><div class="profile"><div class="left column"><div id="date">January 1, 2009
</div><div id="address">Richardson, TX
</div></div><div class="right column"><div id="email">[email protected]
</div><div id="bio">Experienced software professional...
</div></div></div></body></html>
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up vote 2 down vote

Did you try PURE ?
If you give it a try, feel free to post any trouble you may face at the forum

While it was primarly designed for the browser, it works well with Jaxer and Rhino.

I don't know node.js yet but if you can cache some JS and functions in memory, the speed should be even more impressive.

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Node.js does not understand DOM... PURE use the DOM, but since it makes strings of it. This is interesting to investigate. Sorry for the noise. – Mic Dec 5 '09 at 22:05
up vote 2 down vote

There is a port of the Django templating engine to JavaScript. However, its not been updated for a long time but it may still have enough features.

http://code.google.com/p/jtl-javascript-template/

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up vote 2 down vote

Try Yajet too. ;-) It's a new one that I just released yesterday, but I'm using it for a while now and it's stable and fast (templates are compiled to a native JS function).

It has IMO the best syntax possible for a template engine, and a rich feature set despite its small code size (8.5K minified). It has directives that allow you to introduce conditionals, iterate arrays/hashes, define reusable template components etc.

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why not just use eco? – balupton Sep 19 '11 at 1:34
    
Interesting, nice work mishoo. Does it have any advantage over EJS? – trusktr Sep 2 '12 at 19:55
up vote 0 down vote

I found hogan.js from Twitter and recommended by Tim O'Reilly on his site. I have no best practice with it, but I trust on Twitter and O'Reilly. You should try...

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up vote 0 down vote

Honestly, the best and most simple template engine for Node.js is (IMHO) Plates (https://github.com/flatiron/plates). You might also want to check out the Flatiron MVC framework for Node.js (http://flatiron.org).

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up vote -1 down vote

You can use dojox.dtl of DojoToolkit.org. Note that dojo 1.7 can well run on NodeJS and perform as a server side library. If you're interested, I can give you a simple example.

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