Askama

Askama implements a template rendering engine based on Jinja. It generates Rust code from your templates at compile time based on a user-defined struct to hold the template's context. See below for an example, or read the documentation.

"Pretty exciting. I would love to use this already." -- Armin Ronacher, creator of Jinja

All feedback welcome. Feel free to file bugs, requests for documentation and any other feedback to the issue tracker or tweet me. Many thanks to David Tolnay for his support in improving Askama.

Feature highlights

• Construct templates using a familiar, easy-to-use syntax
• Benefit from the safety provided by Rust's type system
• Template code is compiled into your crate for optimal performance
• Templates only convert your data as needed
• Templates can access your Rust types directly, according to Rust's privacy rules
• Debugging features to assist you in template development
• Templates must be valid UTF-8 and produce UTF-8 when rendered
• Works on stable Rust

Supported in templates

• Template inheritance (one level only)
• Basic loops and if/else if/else statements
• Whitespace suppressing with '-' markers
• Some built-in filters

Limitations

• Still in beta -- not very mature yet
• Only a small number of built-in template filters have been implemented
• User-defined template filters are not supported yet
• Debugging template problems can be tricky

How to get started

First, add the following to your crate's Cargo.toml:

# in section [package]
build = "build.rs"

# in section [dependencies]
askama = "0.1"
askama_derive = "0.1"

# in section [build-dependencies]
askama = "0.1"

Because Askama will generate Rust code from your template files, the crate will need to be recompiled when your templates change. This is supported by adding a build script, build.rs, to your crate. It needs askama as a build dependency:

extern crate askama;

fn main() {
    askama::rerun_if_templates_changed();
}

Now create a directory called templates in your crate root. In it, create a file called hello.html, containing the following:

Hello, {{ name }}!

In any Rust file inside your crate, add the following:

#[macro_use]
extern crate askama; // for the Template trait and custom derive macro

use askama::Template; // bring trait in scope

#[derive(Template)] // this will generate the code...
#[template(path = "hello.html")] // using the template in this path, relative
                                 // to the templates dir in the crate root
struct HelloTemplate<'a> { // the name of the struct can be anything
    name: &'a str, // the field name should match the variable name
                   // in your template
}
   
fn main() {
    let hello = HelloTemplate { name: "world" }; // instantiate your struct
    println!("{}", hello.render()); // then render it.
}

You should now be able to compile and run this code.

Review the test cases for more examples.

Debugging and troubleshooting

You can view the parse tree for a template as well as the generated code by changing the template attribute item list for the template struct:

#[derive(Template)]
#[template(path = "hello.html", print = "all")]
struct HelloTemplate<'a> { ... }

The print key can take one of four values:

• none (the default value)
• ast (print the parse tree)
• code (print the generated code)
• all (print both parse tree and code)

The parse tree looks like this for the example template:

[Lit("", "Hello,", " "), Expr(WS(false, false), Var("name")),
Lit("", "!", "\n")]

The generated code looks like this:

#[allow(dead_code, non_camel_case_types)]
impl<'a> askama::Template for HelloTemplate<'a> {
    fn render_to(&self, writer: &mut std::fmt::Write) {
        writer.write_str("Hello,").unwrap();
        writer.write_str(" ").unwrap();
        writer.write_fmt(format_args!("{}", self.name)).unwrap();
        writer.write_str("!").unwrap();
        writer.write_str("\n").unwrap();
    }
}