handlebars.js VS Hugo

If you have a bit of Nodejs SSR background, you would already be accustomed to templating libraries like Pug, Handlebars, EJS, etc. If you’re from a PHP background you would be familiar with the Blade templating engine. These templating libraries basically help you render dynamic data from the backend on the frontend. They also help you generate markup with loops based on conditions.

It’s time to create our code template. To do this, we use handlebars js, which allows us to create templates at a basic level. We create a folder called templates in the project home directory and add our template files inside.

Templating engine: SSGs rely on templating engines to define the structure of web pages. These engines enable developers to create reusable templates and incorporate dynamic content. Popular templating engines include Liquid, Handlebars, Mustache, EJS, ERB, HAML, and Slim.

Here's our first usage of the handlebars (docs) template. The .hbs extension will be removed once we run the action. Inside index.ts.hbs, add:

Id use handlerbars JS - https://handlebarsjs.com/

Node.js programming language will be used for simplicity. Handlebars template engine to separate data from the presentation. html2pdf.app to convert HTML to PDF, but as an alternative Puppeteer can be used also (you can find a complete tutorial How to convert HTML to PDF with puppeteer).

Handlebars.js site

But a valid question is: Why not use a template like Handlebars? For the use case inside Woovi, templates won't help us because we would need two core points: reuse our design system and ensure the usage of GraphQL in our payment link.

You might want to brush up on https://handlebarsjs.com/ if you want to make templates.

Once the package is set up, it will provide a MailService class that has a method named sendEmail that will receive some parameters and then send the mail. But first, we need to create the mail template and for that, we will use handlebars. It will allow us, to create HTML templates in which we can pass dynamics parameters, such as the user name or its information, and write inline CSS to style our email.

At one point though I realized there is a scaling problem with my build minutes. I knew that golang has considerably faster builds and in my case the easy fix is swapping over to Hugo.

This blog is running on Hugo. It had previously been running on Jekyll. Both these SSGs ship with the ability to create excerpts from your markdown content in 1 line or thereabouts.

Hugo

Hugo is a popular static site generator specifically designed to create websites and documentation lightning-fast. Its minimalist approach, emphasis on speed, and ease of use have made it popular among developers, technical writers, and anybody looking to construct high-quality websites without the complexity of typical CMS platforms.

As per many other comments, it sounds like a static site generator like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) or Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/), hosted on GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/) or GitLab Pages (https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/), would be a good match. If you set up GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to do the build and deploy (see e.g. https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/), your normal workflow will simply be to edit markdown and do a git push to make your changes live. There are a number of pre-built themes (e.g. https://themes.gohugo.io/) you can use, and these are realtively straightforward to tweak to your requirements.

Create the technical documentation of your project You can use any of the following options: * A wiki, like the ArchWiki that uses MediaWiki * Read the Docs, used by projects like Setuptools. Check Awesome Read the Docs for more examples. * Create a website * Create a blog, like the documentation of Blowfish, a theme for Hugo.

Doing this made me appreciate existing SSGs like Hugo and Next.js even more👏👏

I suggest hugo: https://gohugo.io/

Generates a completely static website from MD (and other formats) files; also handles themes (including a lot of them rendering well on mobile), and different types of content - posts, articles, etc. - depending on the theme.

It's open source and, being completely static, cheap as fuck to self host.