Saladplate

Simple templating; it's smaller than usual.

Saladplate is a very simple templating tool, with 3 core features:

1. Replace ${{ VAR }} with the contents of the environment variable VAR.
2. Replace $<< filename >> with the contents of the file filename.
3. Replace $(( command )) with the output of the command command.

Each of these replacements supports "injection" mode, useful for layouts/wrappers:

1. Replace $^<< filename >> and everything after it with the contents of filename, but replacing ^^ in that content with the "everything after".
2. Replace $^(( command )) similarly, but with the output of command.
3. Replace $^{{ VAR }} similarly, but with the value of the environment variable VAR.

If you need more functionality than that, this is not the templating tool for you.

Installation

$ npm install -g saladplate
$ saladplate --version
saladplate: version 0.2.1

Usage

The easiest way to use Saladplate with via the saladplate command line tool:

$ saladplate --help

Usage: saladplate [options] <file>...
Options:
  --debug          enable debug mode
  -v, --version    show version information
  -h, --help       show this help message
  -d, --directory  output directory
  -s, --suffix     output suffix; only applies when using --directory
  -o, --output     output file; overrides --directory and --suffix

Saladplate generally operates in 2 modes. If you pass --directory, then each file you pass will be templated independently, and the output written into the given directory. Use --suffix to change the extension of the output file -- for instance, if you template the files some.template and another.txt with --directory=out and --suffix=.html you will end up with a file out/some.html and out/another.html:

$ saladplate --directory=out --suffix=.html *.template

If instead you pass --output, then each file will be templated, with the results concatenated into the single given output file.

$ saladplate --output=index.html *.template

You can also use the exported template function to template a string:

import { template } from "saladplate";
console.info(await template("The current PATH is: ${{ PATH }}"));

Examples

Assuming that GREETING="Hello" then:

${{ GREETING }}, world!

Does what you'd expect. Supposing that quote.html is:

<blockquote>
^^
</blockquote>

Then:

$^<< quote.html >>
${{ GREETING }}, world!

Yields:

<blockquote>
Hello, world!
</blockquote>

Development

When developing locally, you can test your changes using the script saladplate, which uses bun. Note the use of run below, as well as the use of -- to separate arguments to bun run from arguments to saladplate:

$ bun run saladplate -- --version
saladplate: version 0.2.1

Building and publishing

To build the distributable JS:

$ bun run build

This will build to dist/. To publish to NPM:

$ npm publish

Testing

Tests are located in tests/ and consist of input templates tests/*.test and corresponding expected outputs tests/*.expected. To run tests:

$ bun run test