Build HTML apps from JSON APIs in no time

Chaplin maps HTML templates to API endpoints and renders them server-side.

It's great for:

• Quickly prototyping an app from an existing JSON API.
• Quickly shipping an non-user facing app, like an admin interface to your main app for your sales team.
• Writing an app only using HTML, Mustache and YAML.

Installing

Like any other Ruby gem, Chaplin can be installed with

$ gem install chaplin

Or added to an existing project's Gemfile

  gem 'chaplin'

Getting started:

You can create a new project with

$ chaplin new my-app

Here is the basic structure of a Chaplin app:

- public/             # all files in there are served statically
- templates/          # HTML templates that will be rendered using Mustache
- app.yml             # The YAML mapping between API endpoints and HTML templates
- chaplin_config.yml  # The url of the API the server will connect to, and other configuration values

You can start the server either with the chaplin command, or as a Rack application.

Documentation:

• Reference

• chaplin-blog is an example app with a Parse backend

• chaplin-init is a starting point with some basic front end dev tooling (gulp, zurb foundation and such)

Support

For troubleshooting or any questions about using Chaplin, hit me up on twitter @VictorMours.

Chaplin is still in its early days, so I wouldn't recommend it for user-facing production apps just yet. We've been using it for an internal app for a couple month and it does the job.