askama VS sailfish

I have inlined the CSS here, and you can use Rust-based tooling like Lightning CSS to minify and bundle CSS here. You might also want to create a Rust build script to generate the HTML from a template, using the askama crate (works a little like Jinja).

This adds askama itself as well as the Responder trait implementation for the askama::Template type. askama expects your files to be in a subfolder of the project root called templates by default, so let's create the folder and then create an index.html file with the following HTML code in:

You can also use HTML templating with crates like askama, tera and maud! This can be combined with the power of lightweight JavaScript libraries like htmx to speed up time to production. You can read more about this on our other article about using HTMX with Rust which you can find here.. We also collaborated with Stefan Baumgartner on an article for serving HTML with Askama!

This is such a great project, thank you for sharing! It seems like you're getting the usual dump of negativity around HTMX... but as usual, not much coming from anyone who's actually tried to build something small/medium-sized. I keep hearing that this stack "would" fall apart in a bigger project, but I never hear any concrete, empirical descriptions of issues that actually do arise.

I'll offer one here... using HTMX usually means you're going to be writing HTML templates, and HTML templating languages don't have much IDE support. I really miss goto-definition etc. when I'm writing Jinja templates.

That being said, I've personally found Rust/HTMX to be a magnificent combo. I personally find writing backend endpoints in Rust to be no more cumbersome than any other language (after becoming comfortable with Rust)... and there's massive gains from the incredible tooling and type system.

I wonder if you've considered using Askama for your templates? It has a Axum integration that cleans up some of the boilerplate around template rendering. There's also an open PR for block fragments [1], which will make componentization of HTML fragments much easier, as discussed in this essay on the HTMX site [2].

We need more projects like this to demonstrate how useful, highly-interactive apps are made with HTMX. I'd encourage skeptics to try the same before writing it off.

[1] https://github.com/djc/askama/pull/824

This templating languge / engine is heavily inspired by Askama, but brings more rust into your template code. The project is still in early stages and is likely filled with bugs but I wanted to get something out there to get some feedback on.

Askama

Rust allows me to mainly only run the application to confirm things work from a business perspective.

For people starting out building stuff in rust - understand that there is a distinction of async code and libraries and can lead to confusing compiler errors if you don't realize there is a distinction. It's simple in hindsight but did cause me to waste hours barking up the wrong trees at first. Other wise just learn about `match` and Result/Option types asap, they're fundamental.

https://github.com/http-rs/tide tide is great to create an http server / routes

https://github.com/djc/askama I use this to template out HTML and it checks all my boxes, dynamic data, passing in functions, control flow.

https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx sql interface for a variety of backend, async safe.

https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest http client to make requests

Rust is amazing, don't let the initial few speed bumps discourage you - building real things with rust is no more challenging today than any other modern language stack.

I also Suggest using https://crates.io/crates/askama for Templates. even though it can be hard to get use to and they are compile time only It allows you to use Rust functions directly within the Template code. Which can make your life easier.

It was a bug in askama that was fixed. The solution is to use a newer version that contains the fix, but they have not released a new version of askama since fixing the bug, so 0.11.1 still contains the bug. It seems like 0.12 has been a long time coming but should finally be coming soon: https://github.com/djc/askama/issues/722

A good example is Askama, which should look good to folk from the python / django / jinja world: https://github.com/djc/askama

Any recommendations for rust template engines? I'd like something that can easily render labeled fragments of a template instead of requiring me to split a page into a dozen little files. Kinda like inline {{block}} definitions in Go's html/template. Speed is also nice.

From template-benchmark-rs [0] I found sailfish [1] (fast, but no fragments(?)). render-rs [2] and syn-rsx [3] (2022) both let you write html in rust macros which is cool (maybe that can substitute for fragments?). Then there's gtmpl-rust [4] which is just Go templates reimplemented in rust.

[0]: https://github.com/rosetta-rs/template-benchmarks-rs

[1]: https://github.com/rust-sailfish/sailfish

[2]: https://github.com/render-rs/render.rs last updated Jul 2020

[3]: https://github.com/stoically/syn-rsx last updated Nov 2022

[4]: https://github.com/fiji-flo/gtmpl-rust

Sailfish (very fast, but lots of unsafe usages)

(Sailfish is fastest, but it's syntax is of the more traditional <%= msg %> flavour and Markup.rs is second-fastest with a Maud-like syntax but the author apparently doesn't have time to rewrite the syntax reference, so you have to follow a link from the open issue to an old version of the README.)

Using [Actix](actix.rs/), Sailfish, thiserror, and a bunch of supporting libraries reminds me of when I was building a project using Pylons and Mako (now replaced with Pyramid), except without the SQL.

If you're OK with a template engine that can't be used in any sort of "if debug builds, support hot reloading" mode, Sailfish compiles its templates to native code and it's the fastest option around.