Jinja Templating Engine

About

The Jinja Templating Engine is a REST API and Web GUI developped in Flask that allows quick and easy rendering of Jinja2 templates.

You can browse all available templates, with the possibility to either use them with the automatic form generator, or view the raw template files.

The goal of this project is to provide 2 services: a microservice / API to quickly render Jinja2 templates without depending on any specific web front-end, and a tool to automatically generate simple web forms from any Jinja2 template (I'm a network engineer and I use this to render network device configuration).

Getting started

Build and run the Docker image

Clone the repository from GitHub and then build the Docker image:

git clone <url>
cd jinja-templating-engine
docker build -t jinja-templating-engin:latest .
docker run jinja-templating-engine

In this case you will need to mount your local directory containe your Jinja2 templates as a volume to the container's /app/templates directory.

Run the Python code locally

Alternatively, you can run the app directly through Python3 and the Flask library:

git clone <url>
cd jinja-templating-engine
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
python3 app.py

In this case you can copy your templates directly to the templates directory.

Note: As this is a small internall tool app, I'm using Flask's development server. Feel free to replace it with something like Gunicorn if needed.

Usage

REST API

To render a template, send a POST request to http://hostname[:port]/templates/<template-name>, with the variables to be rendered as either application/json or application/x-www-form-urlencoded data. Specify the type of data inside the request's headers' content-type field.

Send JSON will return a JSON object with a singe key:value pair, the key being result and the value being a string containing the rendered template.

Example:

{
    "result": "This string contains your rendered template data\nCheers!"
}

Sending form data will return the rendered template as plain text.

You can also send a GET request to the API endpoint to retrieve the raw template in plain text.

Web GUI

Browse to http://hostname[:port]/ to display the homepage, which will list the available Jinja2 templates (all .j2 files located inside the templates/ folder).

Automatic web form generator

For each template you can use the automatic form generator at http://hostname/forms/<template-name>.

License

Licensed under the GPL v3 License - see LICENSE.md for more information.

© 2023 David Paneels - [email protected]