point-of-view

Templates rendering plugin support for Fastify.

point-of-view decorates the reply interface with the view method for manage view engines that can be used to render templates responses.

Currently supports the following templates engines:

• ejs
• ejs-mate
• nunjucks
• pug
• handlebars
• marko
• mustache
• art-template

In production mode, point-of-view will heavily cache the templates file and functions, while in development will reload every time the template file and function.

Note that at least Fastify v2.0.0 is needed.

Benchmarks

The benchmark were run with the files in the benchmark folder with the ejs engine. The data has been taken with: autocannon -c 100 -d 5 -p 10 localhost:3000

• Express: 8.8k req/sec
• Fastify: 15.6k req/sec

Install

npm install point-of-view --save

Usage

const fastify = require('fastify')()

fastify.register(require('point-of-view'), {
  engine: {
    ejs: require('ejs')
  }
})

fastify.get('/', (req, reply) => {
  reply.view('/templates/index.ejs', { text: 'text' })
})

// With async handler you must return the reply object
fastify.get('/', async (req, reply) => {
  const t = await something()
  reply.view('/templates/index.ejs', { text: 'text' })
  return reply
})

fastify.listen(3000, err => {
  if (err) throw err
  console.log(`server listening on ${fastify.server.address().port}`)
})

Or render a template directly with the fastify.view() decorator:

// With a promise
const html = await fastify.view('/templates/index.ejs', { text: 'text' })

// or with a callback
fastify.view('/templates/index.ejs', { text: 'text' }, (err, html) => {
  // ...
})

If you want to set a fixed templates folder, or pass some options to the template engines:

fastify.register(require('point-of-view'), {
  engine: {
    ejs: require('ejs')
  },
  root: path.join(__dirname, 'view'),
  layout: 'template',
  viewExt: 'html', // it will add the extension to all the views
  options: {}
})

If you want to set a default context that the variable can be using in each view:

fastify.register(require('point-of-view'), {
  engine: {
    ejs: require('ejs')
  },
  defaultContext: {
    dev: process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development'
  }
})

and in the template files like pug can use the variable like:

link(src=dev?"link-to-dev.css":"link-to-pro.css")

Note that the data passing to the template will override the defaultContext

If you want to omit view extension, you can add includeViewExtension property as following:

fastify.register(require('point-of-view'), {
  engine: {
    ejs: require('ejs')
  },
  includeViewExtension: true
});

fastify.get('/', (req, reply) => {
  reply.view('/templates/index', { text: 'text' })
})

Note that to use include files with ejs you also need:

// get a reference to resolve
const resolve = require('path').resolve
// other code ...
// in template engine options configure how to resolve templates folder
  options: {
    filename: resolve('templates')
  }

and in ejs template files (for example templates/index.ejs) use something like:

<% include header.ejs %>

with a path relative to the current page, or an absolute path.

To use partials in mustache you will need to pass the names and paths in the options parameter:

  options: {
    partials: {
      header: 'header.mustache',
      footer: 'footer.mustache'
    }
  }

To use partials in handlebars you will need to pass the names and paths in the options parameter:

  options: {
    partials: {
      header: 'header.hbs',
      footer: 'footer.hbs'
    }
  }

To use layouts in handlebars you will need to pass the layout parameter:

fastify.register(require('point-of-view'), {  
  engine: {  
    handlebars: require('handlebars')  
  },
  layout: './templates/layout.hbs'
});  
  
fastify.get('/', (req, reply) => {  
  reply.view('./templates/index.hbs', { text: 'text' })  
})  

To configure nunjunks environment after initialisation, you can pass callback function to options:

  options: {
    onConfigure: (env) => {
      // do whatever you want on nunjunks env
    }
    
  }

To utilize html-minifier in the rendering process, you can add the option useHtmlMinifier with a reference to html-minifier, and the optional htmlMinifierOptions option is used to specify the html-minifier options:

// get a reference to html-minifier
const minifier = require('html-minifier')
// optionally defined the html-minifier options
const minifierOpts = {
  removeComments: true,
  removeCommentsFromCDATA: true,
  collapseWhitespace: true,
  collapseBooleanAttributes: true,
  removeAttributeQuotes: true,
  removeEmptyAttributes: true
}
// in template engine options configure the use of html-minifier
  options: {
    useHtmlMinifier: minifier,
    htmlMinifierOptions: minifierOpts
  }

To utilize html-minify-stream in the rendering process with template engines that support streams, you can add the option useHtmlMinifyStream with a reference to html-minify-stream, and the optional htmlMinifierOptions option is used to specify the options just like html-minifier:

// get a reference to html-minify-stream
const htmlMinifyStream = require('html-minify-stream')
// optionally defined the html-minifier options that are used by html-minify-stream
const minifierOpts = {
  removeComments: true,
  removeCommentsFromCDATA: true,
  collapseWhitespace: true,
  collapseBooleanAttributes: true,
  removeAttributeQuotes: true,
  removeEmptyAttributes: true
}
// in template engine options configure the use of html-minify-stream
  options: {
    useHtmlMinifyStream: htmlMinifyStream,
    htmlMinifierOptions: minifierOpts
  }

The optional boolean property production will override environment variable NODE_ENV and force point-of-view into production or development mode:

  options: {
    // force production mode
    production: true
  }

Note

By default views are served with the mime type 'text/html; charset=utf-8', but you can specify a different value using the type function of reply, or by specifying the desired charset in the property 'charset' in the opts object given to the plugin.

Acknowledgements

This project is kindly sponsored by:

• nearForm
• LetzDoIt

License

Licensed under MIT.