This series builds on my post, Supercharge Your Web Dev Workflow With Emmet, to which Maciek Fitzner posted a comment mentioning Pug.
Templating languages are widely used in Web development and two of the most popular ones are Pug and Slim. In this series, we're going to learn the basics of these two and hopefully they would help improve your workflow further.
Table of Contents
Emmet vs. Templating Languages
The fundamental difference between Emmet and templating languages like Pug and Slim is that,
- With the former which is just an editor extension, we write abbreviations which expand to full HTML code instantly when we press TAB. So we're basically still writing in HTML.
- The latter, however, are different languages than HTML and have their own syntax. This means these template files must be converted (compiled, as we call it in the programming world) to HTML before being forwarded to browsers to render.
It should be noted that many templating languages do not only support HTML, but can generate other types of files as well. In this series, however, we'll focus on HTML.
Meet Pug
An Overview
Pug is a templating language for Node.js and the browser. It is often used to generate HTML, but it can also be used to generate XML or other types of documents.
How It Works
Here's an example of a simple Pug template that generates an HTML page with a heading and a paragraph:
doctype html
html
head
title My Site
body
h1 Hello, World!
p This is my site.
This template would be compiled into the following HTML:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My Site</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>
<p>This is my site.</p>
</body>
</html>
The rendered page from the HTML looks like this:
As the example demonstrates, Pug uses a combination of whitespace, indentation, and special characters to distinguish between HTML elements, code blocks, and other constructs.
The Pug file is then compiled into HTML files before being served to the browser for rendering. In fact, all templating languages work in similar manner because browers can only read HTML.
Start a Pug Project
Before starting a pug project, make sure you have Node.js installed in your computer. Installation of Node.js is beyond this post, so do a bit of googling if you need any help.
Follow these steps to start a new Pug project:
Step 1:
Create a new directory for your project and navigate to it in the terminal. For example:
mkdir ~/my-pug-project
cd ~/my-pug-project
Step 2:
Initialize the project by creating a package.json file in your project root and install the Pug package. For example:
npm init -y
npm install pug
Or if you choose to use yarn:
yarn init -y
yarn add pug
Step 3:
Create a directory in your project root to hold your Pug templates and create a pug file in it:
mkdir views
touch views/index.pug
Then give the new file the following content:
doctype html
html
head
title My Site
body
- var name = 'Jesse'
h1 Hello, #{name}!
p
| This is my site. It is powered by
|
strong Pug
| .
- var users = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Charlie', 'Dan']
ul
each user in users
li= user
if users.length > 3
p There are more than 3 users in the list.
else
p There are 3 or fewer users in the list.
In this pug file, we used some more advanced features of Pug such as variables, piped text, iteration and conditionals. If you want to further familiarize yourself with these concepts, check out the links.
Our pug template generates the following HTML code:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My Site</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, Jesse!</h1>
<p>This is my site. It is powered by
<strong>Pug</strong>.
</p>
<ul>
<li>Alice</li>
<li>Bob</li>
<li>Charlie</li>
<li>Dan</li>
</ul>
<p>There are more than 3 users in the list.</p>
</body>
</html>
Step 4:
We need a server to compile our Pug file into HTML file, so at our project root, create a server.js file:
touch server.js
And add the following content to it:
const express = require('express');
const app = express();
// Set the view engine to pug
app.set('view engine', 'pug');
// Set the views directory
app.set('views', './views');
// Define a route for the home page
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
res.render('index');
});
// Start the server
const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;
app.listen(port, () => {
console.log(`Listening on port ${port}...`);
});
As we're using the express package here, we need to install it:
npm install express
Or:
yarn add express
If you need help with express or want to learn more about it, check out its official docs.
Step 5:
Start the server by running:
node server.js
Now go to http://localhost:3000 and boom! Our page should be rendered properly like this:
Next Steps
In the first part of the series, we learned the basics of Pug, a popular templating language for generating HTML. We saw some simple but inspiring examples that should be enough to help you get started.
If you want to dive a bit deeper into Pug, I'd recommend you have a look at their docs. Each of the topics is explained with code examples that you can try out instantly.
In the next part, I'll walk you through another templating language, Slim. So please follow me to stay tuned.
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