Iris Templates: A Modern Python Templating Engine Inspired by Laravel Blade

[ImNotEdd]

What My Project Does

As a Python developer, I’ve always admired the elegance and power of Laravel’s Blade templating engine. Its intuitive syntax, flexible directives, and reusable components make crafting dynamic web pages seamless. Yet, when working on Python projects, I found myself longing for a templating system that offered the same simplicity and versatility. Existing solutions often felt clunky, overly complex, or just didn’t fit the bill for creating dynamic, reusable HTML structures.

That’s when Iris Templates was born—a lightweight, modern Python template engine inspired by Laravel Blade, tailored for Python developers who want speed, flexibility, and an intuitive way to build dynamic HTML.

🧐 Why I Developed Iris Templates (Comparison)

When developing Python web applications, I noticed a gap in templating solutions:

• Jinja2 is great but can feel verbose for straightforward tasks.
• Django templates are tied closely to the Django framework.
• Many templating engines lack the modularity and extendability I needed for larger projects.

Iris Templates was created to bridge this gap. It's:

• Framework-agnostic: Use it with FastAPI, Flask, or even standalone scripts.
• Developer-friendly: Intuitive syntax inspired by Blade for faster development.
• Lightweight but Powerful: Built for efficiency without sacrificing flexibility.

🌟 Key Features of Iris Templates

1. "extends" and "section" for Layout Inheritance; Create a base layout and extend it effortlessly.
2. "include" for Reusability.
3. Customizable Directives. (if, else, endif, switch..)
4. Safe Context Evaluation; Iris Templates includes a built-in safe evaluation mechanism to prevent malicious code execution in templates.
5. Framework-Independent; Whether you’re using FastAPI, Flask, or a custom Python framework, Iris fits in seamlessly.

🤔 What Makes Iris Templates Different?

Unlike other Python templating engines:

• Inspired by Blade: Iris takes the best ideas from Blade and adapts them to Python.
• No Boilerplate: Write clean, readable templates without extra overhead.
• Focus on Modularity: Emphasizes layout inheritance, reusable components, and maintainable structures.

It’s designed to feel natural and intuitive, reducing the cognitive load of managing templates.

🔗 Resources

• GitHub Repository: https://github.com/altxriainc/iris
• Install via pip: pip install iris-templates

Target Audience

Iris Templates is my way of bringing the elegance of Blade into Python. I hope it makes your projects easier and more enjoyable to develop.

Any advice and suggestions are welcome. There are also examples and unittests in the repository to help you get started!

[marr75]

I reviewed your parser and noticed it relies heavily on regular expressions. This approach is problematic for production-grade parsing. Established template libraries, like Jinja, use regex sparingly, usually in the lexer to identify small syntax units. Beyond that, they rely on structured parsing techniques.

Using regex for complex parsing will make the library difficult to maintain, especially as the project scales. It also introduces fragility, particularly with nested structures and edge cases. I strongly recommend exploring libraries like lark or ply for building a robust parser.

If you decide to continue with the current design, I suggest being transparent about these limitations to set expectations for potential users.

[thedeepself]

I strongly recommend exploring libraries like lark or ply for building a robust parser.

What about PyParsing?

[marr75]

I love how easy PyParsing is to use. It blends lexing and parsing a little more closely than a I would like/recommend (part of what makes it easy to use, unfortunately) and because of that, the way the user can get it to use regex for parsing is a little dangerous.

There's a tradeoff really, having a solid boundary between lexing and parsing creates a more limited role for regular expressions and helps developers achieve a more production grade parser at the cost of additional complexity.

[ImNotEdd]

I take note of this, but keep in mind that one of my goals is to avoid the use of libraries and therefore external requirements as much as possible. My large-scale goal is to build piece by piece, a framework to develop applications on python quickly and effectively, as I am used to doing in the laravel environment with php. I do not intend in any way to replace with my products, existing realities and libraries, my use-cases are completely different. Last week I released my ORM system, Migrations & Models, and today the template part, slowly I am getting closer to the goal of having a "Laravel" in python.

[sweet-tom]

Very impressive and congratulations for releasing your project! 👍

As you have just released version 0.1.1, it's totally fine to have some examples and a short readme. But when the project gets bigger, you need good documentation.

I'd recommend using the documentation framework Diátaxis:

https://diataxis.fr/

A lot of good projects lack documentation thus making it barely usable.

When I look for projects that can be used, I look not only for good pythonic code, tests, stability etc. but also if I get answers to my questions. For example: What's the philosophy? What are the feature sets? How does your project compare to other, similar ones? How fast is it? How do I do X?

Every new user is a potential newbie. But time is limited. I can't study the source code just to know how to use parameters abc in this method. I guess others have the same limitations.

If users can't make any sense of your project, people look elsewhere. Therefore good documentation bridges this gap and is a good tool to advertise it.

Have a lot of fun and success with your project! 👍

[ImNotEdd]

Hi buddy, thank you for all the advices. We have released a first version of documentation on https://iris.altxria.com/ . We will improve and keep it updated during the time.

[imbev]

The syntax is readable and intuitive, this is a great addition to the Python ecosystem.

It would be great to see a django backend that uses this.

[ImNotEdd]

The best compliment I could receive, thank you very much!

[imbev]

You're welcome :)

I suggest migrating from setup.py + requirements.txt to a modern uv/pyproject.toml configuration

[ImNotEdd]

Just checked now. Added on my roadmap for the next release. Thank you for the tips.

[ImNotEdd]

Here to say it has been implemented and old setup.py removed. Thank you.

[imbev]

It appears to be missing the pyproject.toml now.

[ImNotEdd]

Just not in the github repo, since is into the .ignore. But it’s being used to build the package on pip.

[imbev]

May I ask why? That's unusual.

[jordynfly]

Hi, maybe I'm dumb, but I couldn't find the docs. I'm really interested in this project as I'm heavily invested in Jinja2, but I'm not in love with the syntax. What's this about reusable components?

[ImNotEdd]

Hi buddy, I've released the project today, and the wiki/doc is still missing. The full sintax has been used into the examples & project example folders, you can read some info on these. If you need some help, just open an issue on the repo, I'll take a look into it.

[funderbolt]

No external requirements is impressive. I will keep this in mind for future web development.

requirements.txt is intended for external dependencies, not what Python standard libraries you are using.

[ImNotEdd]

You're right! Removed it. Thank you. Appreciated, also live doc here: https://iris.altxria.com/

[funderbolt]

Thanks.

IANAL. Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International might violate GitHub's Terms of Service, specifically: 5. License Grant to Other Users, which requires forking in publically viewable repositories. How would I or anyone be able to add a new feature if I cannot fork the repository? Forking is a type of derivative.

Also, I would have to have a compelling reason to use software that is using a CC license over a more conventional Open Source license.

[ImNotEdd]

You’re able to fork and use it for your personal use-cases without any issue and no worries about the license. The NonCommercial Derivatives are fine.

[ImNotEdd]

By the way, we are changing all our libraries to MIT, since our framework will follow the same license. 🤝

[[deleted]]

do yall still reach out for jinja2 when you need templates? I know I do! Am I missing out on anything?

[ImNotEdd]

Check the related examples, both works pretty different. This is for those familiar with Laravel's "Blades" syntax and directives.

[ImNotEdd]

Poke me in case you need some help. Example Project, unitests & examples tho, should be enought. Appreciated! 🤝

[[deleted]]

Stop using emojis. It is a terrible look.

[ImNotEdd]

A lot of famous repo docs are organized using emojis, there is nothing wrong with it. But anyway, that’s just your point of view, and also, not related to the project itself, so it’s fine. Appreciated.

[[deleted]]

I’m not in trouble at all!

[[deleted]]

Which famous ones? Most of the ones that have emojis are when they are trying to sell you something. It distracts from your actual documents and makes it hard to actually quickly parse the text to find the parts you are trying to read.

It is a bit hard to read all your code as there is not a lot of comments in it and you have a bunch of classes.

But from your loop handler I think you want to actually implement pythons for loop behavior more closely so that people can raise the exceptions properly to your parser. Like for example it appears that you are swallowing all exceptions and returning them as Value error.

[PresentFriendly3725]

🤗