This blog post is firstly published on my blogging site kanby.net
TL;DR
- The templating engine will give us the ability to use
res.render()
instead ofres.send()
-
res.engine()
will decide whatres.render()
will send
Start Here
We will create a directory which will contain our custom files inside. We will give it custom extention. In this tutorial, my extention will be "kanby".
Lets create our custom files in that pages folder.
now its time to create our template engine.
first we import required packages
const express = require("express");
const fs = require("fs");
Then write that how you want your template engine to work
app.engine('kanby', (filePath, options, callback) => {
fs.readFile(filePath, (err, content) => {
// Error handler
if (err) return callback(err)
// process the content of file here
// you can custumize however you want
// this will change only #title# and #message#
// but you can do advenced stuff with regular expressions.
// this example is the example used in express js docs
const rendered = content.toString()
.replace('#title#', `<title>${options.title}</title>`)
.replace('#message#', `<h1>${options.message}</h1>`)
return callback(null, rendered)
})
})
After that, you need to define 2 more setting.
app.set('views', './pages') // specify the directory for pages
app.set('view engine', 'kanby') // register the template engine
Then you are ready !
You can use res.render()
function to render your own files.
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
res.render('landingpage', { title: 'Hey', message: 'Hello there!' })
})
First it will render landingpage.kanby, the it will send rendered content to client. please do not forget to add status code
res.status(200).render();
Future Plans
This is basically an enterance for templating engine developement. This is so simple
in my further blogs, i am thinking to create an advanced (usable) template engine for express JS.
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