MiniJinja is a powerful but minimal dependency template engine for Rust compatible with Jinja/Jinja2
MiniJinja is a powerful but minimal dependency template engine which is based on the syntax and behavior of the Jinja2 template engine for Python.
It's implemented in Rust and Go and is also available via WASM for JavaScript and as a Python extension module and as a command line utility.
It's supports all serde types and only has it as a single required dependency. It supports a range of features from Jinja2 including inheritance, filters and more. The goal is that it should be possible to use some templates in Rust programs without the fear of pulling in complex dependencies for a small problem. Additionally it tries not to re-invent something but stay in line with prior art to leverage an already existing ecosystem of editor integrations.
$ cargo tree
minimal v0.1.0 (examples/minimal)
โโโ minijinja v2.21.0 (minijinja)
โโโ serde v1.0.144
Additionally minijinja is also available as an (optionally pre-compiled) command line executable called minijinja-cli:
$ curl -sSfL https://github.com/mitsuhiko/minijinja/releases/latest/download/minijinja-cli-installer.sh | sh
$ echo "Hello {{ name }}" | minijinja-cli - -Dname=World
Hello World
You can play with MiniJinja online in the browser playground powered by a WASM build of MiniJinja.
Goals:
- Well documented, compact API
- Minimal dependencies, reasonable compile times and decent runtime performance
- Stay as close as possible to Jinja2
- Support for expression evaluation which
- Support for all
serdecompatible types - Well tested
- Support for dynamic runtime objects with methods and dynamic attributes
- Descriptive errors
- Bindings for JavaScript,
- Also available for Go
- Comes with a handy CLI
- Compiles to WebAssembly
Example
Example Template:
{% extends "layout.html" %}
{% block body %}
<p>Hello {{ name }}!</p>
{% endblock %}
Invoking from Rust:
use minijinja::{Environment, context};
fn main() { let mut env = Environment::new(); env.add_template("hello.txt", "Hello {{ name }}!").unwrap(); let template = env.get_template("hello.txt").unwrap(); println!("{}", template.render(context! { name => "World" }).unwrap()); }
Getting Help
If you are stuck with MiniJinja, have suggestions or need help, you can use the GitHub Discussions.
Related Crates
- minijinja-autoreload: provides
- minijinja-embed: provides
- minijinja-contrib: provides
- minijinja-py: makes MiniJinja
- minijinja-js: makes MiniJinja
- minijinja-go: a native Go
- minijinja-cli: a command line utility.
- minijinja-cabi: a C binding to MiniJinja.
Use Cases and Users
Here are some interesting Open Source users and use cases of MiniJinja. The examples link directly to where the engine is used so you can see how it's utilized:
- AI Chat Templating:
- Data and Processing:
- HTML Generation:
- Code Generation:
Similar Projects
These are related template engines for Rust:
- Askama: Jinja inspired, type-safe, requires template
- Tera: Jinja inspired, dynamic, has divergences from Jinja.
- Liquid: an implementation of Liquid templates for Rust.
- TinyTemplate: minimal footprint template engine
Sponsor
If you like the project and find it useful you can become a sponsor.
AI Use Disclaimer
This codebase mostly predates LLM based code generation but some recent features have been built with support of AI. For the AI contribution rules see AI Disclosure Rules.