handlebars-rust

Rust templating with Handlebars.

• travis-ci:
• crates.io: handlebars
• document: rust-doc

Warning: This project, like rust, is in its early stage. Breaking changes are constantly introduced.

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 wihtout 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.

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 by impl HelperDef, and register it
• Render something
• Make your custom struct ToJson-able.

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

Handlebars for Iron

Handlebars is created to work with other web framework like Iron. You can easily integrate Handlebars as a middileware. Checkout feature/iron branch (will be moved to a standalone project) examples/iron.rs for how to.

Run cargo run --example iron and visit http://localhost:3000/ to see results.

I will eventually make this middleware a standalone module, with directory scan and auto reload support. But currently it's still difficult to get iron compiled, so this example is placed in a separated branch.

License

MIT, of course.

Contact

Ning Sun (sunng@about.me)