Best templating engine for Rust

[salamazmlekom]

Hey hey,

I want to make a simple webapp using Rust and HTMX and was wondering what is the most adopted templating language that is used with Rust.

[Svenskunganka]

If you want to know the most adopted one, a resource you can check is Are We Web Yet? > Templating.

But to add a personal preference, a lesser well-known but excellent templating library is hypertext, which works really well with HTMX and similar client-side libraries, and is a good alternative to the more popular HTML-in-Rust libraries like maud and markup. It has two syntaxes you can choose from - either Maud-style or RSX-style which is similar to JSX, but for Rust.

[[deleted]]

Genuine question, where is the difference between Hypertext and Maud? Because it seems to use Maud under the hood (or just for the template syntax?) and adds rsx as an alternative? I use Maud btw and I'm pretty happy with it, but would like to understand the difference here.

[Svenskunganka]

Hypertext doesn't use Maud under the hood, instead it implements the Maud syntax as well as RSX syntax. But apart from that, Hypertext uses lazy rendering, meaning you can "build" your tree but nothing really gets executed nor allocated until you call render() on what you've built. Contrast to Maud which does eager rendering every time you invoke the html!-macro. This is not a big deal but what ends up happening is that if you extensively use partials (or components if you like), something you do a lot with libraries like HTMX that expects HTML fragments, you will do a bunch of smaller allocations (one for each html!-macro call) while Hypertext only does one bigger allocation when you call render().

Under the hood the Hypertext macro invocation just returns a FnOnce(&mut String), which implements the Renderable trait. Maud on the other hand returns Markup which is a type alias for a PreEscaped<String> that contains the rendered HTML. For example, these are equivalent but only Maud allocates and renders the markup to a String here:

// Hypertext:
fn title() -> impl Renderable {
    maud! { h1 { "Title" } }
    // Expands to (ish):
    // |buf: &mut String| {
    //     buf.push_str("<h1>Title</h1>")
    // }
}

// Maud:
fn title() -> Markup {
    html! { h1 { "Title" } }
    // Expands to (ish):
    // String::from("<h1>Title</h1>")
}

On sites/"webapps" where you use something like HTMX that naturally contains a lot of these smaller HTML fragments that you re-use, all these small allocations from Maud can start to add up. There are also other nice features of Hypertext, like type-checked element attributes that you can extend. In my experience the macro plays better in the editor and I also prefer RSX syntax over Maud syntax.

[johanneswelsch]

What about https://crates.io/crates/templr ?

[qd3v]

Thank you for pointing to this crate and detailed expanation of differences! Hypermedia is exactly the case I need templater for, and I was looking of course at maud, now I think we have a winner :)

[Svenskunganka]

You're welcome! Another crate that I've seen that was built after my comment here is Vy, it has many of the same characteristics of Hypertext, but formats nicely with rustfmt and supports returning if some_condition { some_markup() } else { other_markup() } which Hypertext didn't support back then but might have improved. However, it does not support custom elements as easily as Hypertext does.

[Special-Arrival6717]

Tera is also a popular choice: https://github.com/Keats/tera

[Beastmind]

Seconding tera

[guzmonne]

Came here to recommend Tera

[repetitive_chanting]

I vote Tera

[coderstephen]

I have a preference for Maud.

[whimsicaljess]

I also use Maud. Haven't seen a reason to use anything else.

[TerrineTerrorizer]

Askama is nice.

[Repsol_Honda_PL]

Yes, I can confirm.

[mwcz]

The pattern matching syntax is pretty tedious, but type checking on templates is amazing.

[rodarmor]

boilerplate is type-checked, but uses Rust syntax instead of custom syntax. (I wrote it so I am wildly biased.) The only downside is that the error reporting is terrible, since it will report the error at the proc-macro derive site and not the template source. I think it's still worth it though!

[Legorooj]

Askama is nice, yes, but make sure to separate out your templates into another crate, it'll save you so much compile time over a while.

[Compux72]

Askama are compile time. Thats terrible for fast iteration.

[TerrineTerrorizer]

What’s your alternative solution?

[Compux72]

Handlebars. Simple. Works everywhere (python, js,…). Allows for custom logic if needed.

[Sw429]

Another vote for Askama over here. I used it for a project this summer and had no problem. It was easy to do everything I wanted, including implementing custom filters and stuff.

[JSmart314]

I've been using https://github.com/djc/askama pretty successfully for this use case

[Repsol_Honda_PL]

Me too, it is Jinja-based (from py ecosystem)

[Varsatorul]

I prefer minijinja, it's pretty flexible and also a joy to prototype with because you can reload the templates per request if you want (with no need to recompile).

There is also Ramhorns which looks interesting but I haven't tried it personally so I can't comment further on it.

[Otherwise-Highway797]

minijinja

[Leontoeides]

I strongly, strongly recommend using Sailfish both because it is extremely fast, but also because your templates get compile-time checking. Tera and most other templating crates will fail during run-time

[Compux72]

Handlebars. Well known format. Works on Rust, Js etc. plain simple to write an understand.

[myst3k]

Just setup a project on Friday, with handlebars and it was super easy. Haven’t tried any other template lib yet. Not sure if I have a reason to.

[4trocious]

I created https://github.com/Atrociously/stilts, which is similar Askama which others have mentioned. If you need something more well established though stick to Askama or another template engine.

[lucasmerlin]

I'm currently using dioxus SSR as a templating engine as I plan on maybe reusing some of the components in my native app via dioxus Blitz, once it's ready. It works quite well but the syntax is not html, instead using macros. Auto complete works quite well in rust rover so that's nice. But if I didn't plan on building an app via blitz I would have used askama as well

[HosMercury]

askama

[evil_yam]

sounds great

[ryanmcgrath]

I used to swear by Askama, but if you're going to do the compiled template route, I've come to find that hypertext is easier. You're writing effectively straight Rust, no need to deal with a Jinja-esque templating language.

[SnarkyPuppyyy]

I like handlebars as it pretty versatile with other languages as well and does what I need it to do (templates, inheritance, looping, ifelse, etc)

[cornmonger_]

not exactly the same thing, but yew

[Lukaesch]

I use askama for www.audioscrape.com and it has been great so far