MiniJinja: a powerful template engine for Rust with minimal dependencies

MiniJinja is a powerful but minimal dependency template engine for Rust which is based on the syntax and behavior of the Jinja2 template engine for Python.

It's implemented on top of serde 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)
└── minijinja v1.0.10 (minijinja)
    └── serde v1.0.144

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 close as possible to Jinja2
• Support for expression evaluation which allows the use as a DSL
• Support for all serde compatible types
• Well tested
• Support for dynamic runtime objects with methods and dynamic attributes
• Descriptive errors
• Compiles to WebAssembly
• Works with Python
• Comes with a handy CLI

{% extends "layout.html" %}
{% block body %}
  <p>Hello {{ name }}!</p>
{% endblock %}

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());
}

If you are stuck with MiniJinja, have suggestions or need help, you can use the GitHub Discussions.

• minijinja-autoreload: provides auto reloading functionality of environments
• minijinja-contrib: provides additional utilities too specific for the core
• minijinja-stack-ref: provides functionality to pass values from the stack
• minijinja-py: makes MiniJinja available to Python

These are related template engines for Rust:

• Askama: Jinja inspired, type-safe, requires template precompilation. Has significant divergence from Jinja syntax in parts.
• Tera: Jinja inspired, dynamic, has divergences from Jinja.
• TinyTemplate: minimal footprint template engine with syntax that takes lose inspiration from Jinja and handlebars.
• Liquid: an implementation of Liquid templates for Rust. Liquid was inspired by Django from which Jinja took it's inspiration.

If you like the project and find it useful you can become a sponsor.

• Documentation
• Discussions
• Examples
• Issue Tracker
• MiniJinja Playground
• License: Apache-2.0