What is nunjucks?
Nunjucks is a powerful templating engine for JavaScript, inspired by Jinja2. It is designed to be fast, extendable, and easy to use, making it suitable for both server-side and client-side applications.
What are nunjucks's main functionalities?
Template Rendering
Nunjucks allows you to render templates with dynamic data. In this example, the template 'Hello {{ name }}!' is rendered with the context { name: 'World' }, resulting in 'Hello World!'.
const nunjucks = require('nunjucks');
nunjucks.configure({ autoescape: true });
const renderedString = nunjucks.renderString('Hello {{ name }}!', { name: 'World' });
console.log(renderedString);
Template Inheritance
Nunjucks supports template inheritance, allowing you to create a base template and extend it in other templates. This example shows a base template 'base.html' and an extending template 'index.html'. The rendered output will have the title 'Home' and the content 'Welcome to the homepage!'.
const nunjucks = require('nunjucks');
nunjucks.configure('views');
// base.html
// <html>
// <head><title>{% block title %}Default Title{% endblock %}</title></head>
// <body>{% block content %}{% endblock %}</body>
// </html>
// index.html
// {% extends 'base.html' %}
// {% block title %}Home{% endblock %}
// {% block content %}Welcome to the homepage!{% endblock %}
const renderedString = nunjucks.render('index.html');
console.log(renderedString);
Custom Filters
Nunjucks allows you to create custom filters to manipulate data within templates. In this example, a custom filter 'shorten' is created to truncate a string to a specified length. The template 'Result: {{ message | shorten(7) }}' will render as 'Result: Hello, ' when provided with the context { message: 'Hello, World!' }.
const nunjucks = require('nunjucks');
nunjucks.configure();
nunjucks.addFilter('shorten', function(str, count) {
return str.slice(0, count || 5);
});
const renderedString = nunjucks.renderString('Result: {{ message | shorten(7) }}', { message: 'Hello, World!' });
console.log(renderedString);
Other packages similar to nunjucks
handlebars
Handlebars is another popular templating engine for JavaScript. It uses a similar syntax to Nunjucks but is more focused on simplicity and logic-less templates. Handlebars is known for its ease of use and integration with various frameworks.
ejs
EJS (Embedded JavaScript) is a templating engine that allows you to generate HTML with plain JavaScript. It is less feature-rich compared to Nunjucks but is very straightforward and easy to use, making it a good choice for simple templating needs.
pug
Pug, formerly known as Jade, is a high-performance template engine heavily influenced by Haml. It uses indentation-based syntax, which can be more concise but also has a steeper learning curve compared to Nunjucks. Pug is known for its clean and readable templates.
Nunjucks
Nunjucks is a full featured templating engine for javascript. It is a
direct port of the Python-powered jinja2
templating engine and aims to be feature-complete with jinja2.
It was born out of frustration with other javascript templating
engines. The most popular ones either are ugly and don't abstract
enough (EJS) or have too different of a syntax (Jade).
The only other project like this is
jinjs, which seems to have
been abandoned. The code is also not Javascript, but Coco, is
difficult to work on, has bugs, and is missing features. Nunjucks
hopes to be a robust, pure javascript, and easily extended port of
jinja2.
Installation
npm install nunjucks
Documentation
See http://nunjucks.jlongster.com/ for complete documentation.