handlebars-rust

(Photo ref)

Rust templating with Handlebars.

Thanks to @blaenk's patch, handlebars-rust now compiles on nightly, beta and stable (1.4.0+) channel.

Documents

Rust doc.

Usage

Check examples in the source. The example shows you how to:

• Create a Handlebars and register the template from files
• Create a custom Helper with closure or struct implementing HelperDef, and register it
• Render something

Run cargo run --example render to see results. (or RUST_LOG=handlebars=info cargo run --example render for logging output).

Checkout examples/ for more concrete demos of current API.

From 0.13, you can use either rustc_serialize or serde for your data type. By default we use ToJson from rustc_serialize to convert your data into handlebars internal types. If you use serde framework in your project, you can enable serde_type feature of this crate and we will use Serialize from serde to convert.

Why Handlebars?

For information about handlebars, you will go to handlebars.js.

It's my favorite templating tool by far. I used it in Delicious.com as javascript-side template in 2013. Also I maintained a Clojure wrapper for Handlebars.java, hbs. And you may notice the close relationship between Ember.js and Rust community, handlebars is the default templating language of Ember.js framework, which powers crates.io.

Reasons I prefer Handlebars:

• Never ruin your Rust with HTML
• Never ruin your HTML with Rust
• Templating without a reuse mechanism is shit
• Templating without customization is nothing but shit

Handlebars provides:

• Separation of Rust and HTML
• A few control structures makes templating easier
• Few control structures stops you to put logic into templates
• Template reuse with include(>), partial and block
• Customize template behavior with helpers

Limitations:

• As a static typed language, it's a little verbose to use handlebars
• You will have to make your data ToJson-able, so we can render it. If you are on nightly channel, we have a syntax extension to generate default ToJson implementation for you. If you use serde, you can enable serde_type feature of handlebars-rust and add #[Serialize] for your types.

Handlebars-js features supported in Handlebars-rust

• Expression / Block Helpers
• Built-in helpers
• Customizing helper
• Parameter and hashes for helper
• Partials, include
• Omitting whitespace with ~
• Subexpression {{(foo bar)}}
• Json expression a.b.[0] and a.b.[c]

Feel free to report an issue if you find something broken. We aren't going to implement all features of handlebars-js, but we should have a workaround for cases we don't support.

Handlebars for Iron

I have started another project handlebars-iron for the Iron web framework.

Break Change Log

No doubt that we will try our best to keep API compatible in each release. But sometime we have to bring in break changes to improve the design when worthy.

• 0.10.0: renderw now accepts &Context instead of ToJson to avoid unnecessary clone in batch rendering. 90274e7

License

MIT, of course.

Contact

Ning Sun (sunng@about.me)