Home

Awesome

grunt-template Build status Dependency status

This Grunt plugin interpolates template files with any data you provide and saves the result to another file.

Since grunt.template.process is used for the templating, this Grunt plugin is very lightweight and doesn’t have any dependencies (other than Grunt itself).

Getting started

This plugin requires Grunt v0.4.0+.

If you haven’t used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you’re familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-template --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-template');

The template task

Overview

In your project’s Gruntfile, add a section named template to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
	'template': {
		'options': {
			// Task-specific options go here
		},
		'your-target': {
			'options': {
				// Target-specific options go here
			},
			'files': {
				// Target-specific file lists go here
			}
		}
	}
});

Options

The options property accepts the following options:

data

Type: Object or Function Default: {}

This object contains the data that will be used while interpolating the template files. If you pass a function instead, it will be called when grunt-template needs the template data (lazy evaluation). This is useful if you want to load data from a file that is generated by another Grunt task, for example.

delimiters

Type: String or Function Default: config

This is the delimiters' name that will be used to interpolate and evaluate code. A function that returns this name can be used too. This property is useful when you want to generate JSP/ERB like code and you need the default interpolation delimiters to be <% and %>. See below for an example.

Template syntax

Under the hood, grunt-template uses grunt.template.process, which in turn relies on Lo-Dash’s _.template() method. Here’s a quick reminder of the default delimiters:

For more details and examples, see the Lo-Dash’s API documentation for the _.template() method.

Usage example

Here’s a practical example of grunt-template. Here, the file src/post.html.tpl is loaded, then parsed as a template using the provided data object (with title, author and content properties), and finally the result is saved as dist/post.html.

src/post.html.tpl

<!DOCTYPE html>
<title><%- title %></title>
<h1><%- title %>, by <%- author %></h1>
<p><%- content %></p>

Gruntfile.js

module.exports = function(grunt) {
	grunt.initConfig({
		'template': {
			'process-html-template': {
				'options': {
					'data': {
						'title': 'My blog post',
						'author': 'Mathias Bynens',
						'content': 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.'
					}
				},
				'files': {
					'dist/post.html': ['src/post.html.tpl']
				}
			}
		}
	});
	grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-template');
	grunt.registerTask('default', [
		'template'
	]);
};

dist/post.html (the end result)

<!DOCTYPE html>
<title>My blog post</title>
<h1>My blog post, by Mathias Bynens</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>

Gruntfile.js (using a custom delimiter)

module.exports = function(grunt) {
	grunt.template.addDelimiters('handlebars-like-delimiters', '{{', '}}')
	grunt.initConfig({
		'template': {
			'process-html-template': {
				'options': {
					'data': {
						'title': 'My blog post',
						'author': 'Mathias Bynens',
						'content': 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.'
					},
					'delimiters': 'handlebars-like-delimiters'
				},
				'files': {
					'dist/post.html': ['src/post.html.tpl']
				}
			}
		}
	});
	grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-template');
	grunt.registerTask('default', [
		'template'
	]);
};

src/post.html.tpl (using a custom delimiter)

<!DOCTYPE html>
<title>{{- title }}</title>
<h1>{{- title }}, by {{- author }}</h1>
<p>{{- content }}</p>

Notes

If you use gulp instead of Grunt, but want to perform a similar task, use gulp-template.

Author

twitter/mathias
Mathias Bynens

License

grunt-template is available under the MIT license.