Kitura-TemplateEngine

The Kitura template engine abstraction layer.

Kitura-TemplateEngine provides a TemplateEngine protocol to unify the APIs of multiple template engines and integrate them with Kitura's content generation APIs. At runtime, the template engine replaces variables in a template file with actual values, and transforms the template into an HTML file sent to the client. This approach makes it easier to design an HTML page with integrated Swift code.

• Inspired by http://expressjs.com/en/guide/using-template-engines.html.

List of Plugins:

Kitura-TemplateEngine is an easy to learn, consumable framework that comes with a set of implemented plugins:

• Kitura-StencilTemplateEngine
• Kitura-MustacheTemplateEngine
• Kitura-Markdown

Usage

We don't expect you to need to import Kitura-TemplateEngine, as it will automatically be pulled in as a dependency by the above plugins (you can see an example of this in Examples below) - unless you are implementing a new plugin for Kitura-TemplateEngine. If you do need to directly add Kitura-TemplateEngine as a dependency you can do so as follows:

Add dependencies

Add the Kitura-TemplateEngine package to the dependencies within your application’s Package.swift file. Substitute "x.x.x" with the latest Kitura-TemplateEngine release.

.package(url: "https://github.com/Kitura-Next/Kitura-TemplateEngine.git", from: "x.x.x")

Add KituraTemplateEngine to your target's dependencies:

.target(name: "example", dependencies: ["KituraTemplateEngine"]),

Import package

import KituraTemplateEngine

Examples

The following code examples use the Kitura-StencilTemplateEngine, however, because this is an abstraction layer, Stencil could be substituted for any supported template engine.

If you are using Stencil, within your Package.swift file you will need to:

• Define "https://github.com/Kitura-Next/Kitura-StencilTemplateEngine.git" as a dependency.
• Add "KituraStencil" to the targets for Application.

You will also need to add KituraStencil to the file where you're writing your Swift code:

import KituraStencil

The following code initializes a Stencil template engine and adds it to the Kitura router. This will render files with the template engine's default file extension, in this example these would be .stencil files.

router.add(templateEngine: StencilTemplateEngine())

Here we show how to render files which don't have the same default file extension as the chosen template engine. In this example useDefaultFileExtension is set to false, so the default file extension (.stencil in this case) will not be rendered and files with the extension .example will be rendered.

router.add(templateEngine: StencilTemplateEngine(), forFileExtensions: [".example"], useDefaultFileExtension: false)

If there are any files with file extensions which do not match any of the template engines which have been added to the router, the router will render the file using the default template engine. You can set the default template engine for the router as follows:

router.setDefault(templateEngine: StencilTemplateEngine())

The following example will render the Stencil template example.stencil and add it to our router's response. The template file will be retrieved from the default location, which is the Views folder. The context variable allows you to pass data through to the template engine and must be valid JSON.

router.get("/example") { request, response, next in
    var context: [String: Any] = ["key" : "value"]
    try response.render("example.stencil", context: context)
    next()
}

Swift version

Requires Swift 5.1 or newer. You can download this version of the Swift binaries by following this link. Compatibility with other Swift versions is not guaranteed.

API Documentation

For more information visit our API reference.

Community

We love to talk server-side Swift, and Kitura. Join our Slack to meet the team!

License

This library is licensed under Apache 2.0. Full license text is available in LICENSE.