Papercraft

Composable templating for Ruby

What is Papercraft?

Papercraft is a templating engine for dynamically producing HTML, XML or JSON. Papercraft templates are expressed in plain Ruby, leading to easier debugging, better protection against HTML/XML injection attacks, and better code reuse.

Papercraft templates can be composed in a variety of ways, facilitating the usage of layout templates, and enabling a component-oriented approach to building complex web interfaces.

In Papercraft, dynamic data is passed explicitly to the template as block arguments, making the data flow easy to follow and understand. Papercraft also lets developers create derivative templates using full or partial parameter application.

Papercraft includes built-in support for rendering Markdown (using Kramdown), as well as support for creating template extensions in order to allow the creation of component libraries.

Papercraft automatically escapes all text emitted in templates according to the template type. For more information see the section on escaping content.

require 'papercraft'

page = Papercraft.html { |*args|
  html {
    head { title 'Title' }
    body { emit_yield *args }
  }
}
page.render { p 'foo' }
#=> "<html><head><title>Title</title></head><body><p>foo</p></body></html>"

hello = page.apply { |name| h1 "Hello, #{name}!" }
hello.render('world')
#=> "<html><head><title>Title</title></head><body><h1>Hello, world!</h1></body></html>"

Table of Content

Installing Papercraft
Using with Tilt
Basic Usage
Adding Tags
Tag and Attribute Formatting
Escaping Content
Direct Iteration
Template Parameters
Template Logic
Template Blocks
Template Fragments
Plain Procs as Templates
Template Composition
Parameter and Block Application
Higher-Order Templates
Layout Template Composition
Emitting Raw HTML
Emitting a String with HTML Encoding
Emitting Markdown
Working with MIME Types
Deferred Evaluation
HTML Templates
XML Templates
JSON Templates
Papercraft Extensions
- Extending Specific Templates
- Inline Helper Methods
- Bundled Extensions
API Reference

Installing Papercraft

Using bundler:

gem 'papercraft'

Or manually:

$ gem install papercraft

Basic Usage

To create an HTML template use Papercraft.html:

require 'papercraft'

html = Papercraft.html {
  div(id: 'greeter') { p 'Hello!' }
}

(You can also use Papercraft.xml and Papercraft.json to create XML and JSON templates, respectively.)

Rendering a template is done using #render:

html.render #=> "<div id="greeter"><p>Hello!</p></div>"

Using with Tilt

Papercraft templates can also be rendered using Tilt:

require 'tilt/papercraft'

# loading from a file (with a .papercraft extension)
template = Tilt.new('mytemplate.papercraft')
template.render

# defining a template inline:
template = Tilt['papercraft'].new { <<~RUBY
  h1 'Hello'
RUBY
}
template.render

When rendering using Tilt, the following local variables are available to the template: scope, locals and block:

template = Tilt['papercraft'].new { <<~RUBY
  title scope.title

  h1 locals[:message]

  emit block if block
RUBY
}

def title
  'foo'
end

template.render(self, message: 'bar') { p 'this is a paragraph' }

Adding Tags

Tags are added using unqualified method calls, and can be nested using blocks:

Papercraft.html {
  html {
    head {
      title 'page title'
    }
    body {
      article {
        h1 'article title'
      }
    }
  }
}

Tag methods accept a string argument, a block, or no argument at all:

Papercraft.html { p 'hello' }.render #=> "<p>hello</p>"

Papercraft.html { p { span '1'; span '2' } }.render #=> "<p><span>1</span><span>2</span></p>"

Papercraft.html { hr() }.render #=> "<hr/>"

Tag methods also accept tag attributes, given as a hash:

Papercraft.html { img src: '/my.gif' }.render #=> "<img src=\"/my.gif\"/>"

Papercraft.html { p "foobar", class: 'important' }.render #=> "<p class=\"important\">foobar</p>"

A true attribute value will emit a valueless attribute. A nil or false attribute value will emit nothing:

Papercraft.html { button disabled: nil }.render #=> "<button></button>"
Papercraft.html { button disabled: true }.render #=> "<button disabled></button>"

An attribute value given as an array will be joined by space characters:

Papercraft.html { div class: [:foo, :bar] }.render #=> "<div class=\"foo bar\"></div>"

Tag and Attribute Formatting

Papercraft does not make any assumption about what tags and attributes you can use. You can mix upper and lower case letters, and you can include arbitrary characters in tag and attribute names. However, in order to best adhere to the HTML and XML specs and common practices, tag names and attributes will be formatted according to the following rules, depending on the template type:

HTML: underscores are converted to dashes:

  Papercraft.html {
    foo_bar { p 'Hello', data_name: 'world' }
  }.render #=> '<foo-bar><p data-name="world">Hello</p></foo-bar>'

XML: underscores are converted to dashes, double underscores are converted to colons:

  Papercraft.xml {
    soap__Envelope(
      xmlns__soap:  'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/',
    ) { }
  }.render #=> '<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"><soap:Envelope>'

If you need more precise control over tag names, you can use the #tag method, which takes the tag name as its first parameter, then the rest of the parameters normally used for tags:

Papercraft.html {
  tag 'cra_zy__:!tag', 'foo'
}.render #=> '<cra_zy__:!tag>foo</cra_zy__:!tag>'

Escaping Content

Papercraft automatically escapes all text content emitted in a template. The specific escaping algorithm depends on the template type. For both HTML and XML templates, Papercraft uses escape_utils, specifically:

HTML: escape_utils.escape_html
XML: escape_utils.escape_xml

In order to emit raw HTML/XML, you can use the #emit method as described below.

JSON templates are rendered using the json gem bundled with Ruby, which takes care of escaping text values.

Direct Iteration

Papercraft enables iterating directly over any enumerable data source. Instead of rendering each item in a given data container by wrapping it inside of an #each block, we can simply pass the data source directly to the tag using the _for attribute. This is particularly useful when we need to create a set of nested tags for each item. Consider the following example:

data = %w{foo bar}

Papercraft.html {
  data.each { |item|
    tr {
      td item
    }
  }
}.render #=> '<tr><td>foo</td></tr><tr><td>bar</td></tr>'

Instead of using data.each to iterate over the list of data, we can directly pass the data source to the tr tag using the special _for attribute:

Papercraft.html {
  tr(_for: data) { |item|
    td item
  }
}.render #=> '<tr><td>foo</td></tr><tr><td>bar</td></tr>'

Note that this will work with any data source that is an Enumerable or an Enumerator. For example, you can use #each_with_index or iterate over a hash. Papercraft will pass all yielded values to the given block:

data = %{foo bar}
Papercraft.html {
  tr(_for: data.each_with_index) { |item, idx|
    td idx + 1
    td item
  }
}.render #=> '<tr><td>1</td><td>foo</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>bar</td></tr>'

data = [
  { name: 'foo', age: 16 },
  { name: 'bar', age: 32 }
]
Papercraft.html {
  div(_for: data, class: 'row') { |row|
    div(_for: row) { |k, v|
      span k
      span v
    }
  }
}.render
#=> '<div class="row"><div><span>name</span><span>foo</span></div><div><span>age</span><span>16</span></div></div>'
#=> '<div class="row"><div><span>name</span><span>bar</span></div><div><span>age</span><span>32</span></div></div>'

Template Parameters

In Papercraft, parameters are always passed explicitly. This means that template parameters are specified as block parameters, and are passed to the template on rendering:

greeting = Papercraft.html { |name| h1 "Hello, #{name}!" }
greeting.render('world') #=> "<h1>Hello, world!</h1>"

Templates can also accept named parameters:

greeting = Papercraft.html { |name:| h1 "Hello, #{name}!" }
greeting.render(name: 'world') #=> "<h1>Hello, world!</h1>"

Template Logic

Since Papercraft templates are just a bunch of Ruby, you can easily embed your view logic right in the template:

Papercraft.html { |user = nil|
  if user
    span "Hello, #{user.name}!"
  else
    span "Hello, guest!"
  end
}

Template Blocks

Templates can also accept and render blocks by using emit_yield:

page = Papercraft.html {
  html {
    body { emit_yield }
  }
}

# we pass the inner HTML
page.render { h1 'hi' }

Template Fragments

Template fragments allow rendering specific parts of a template, instead of the entire template. For example, you can define a template for a web page that includes a form, but may want to render just the form. Instead of extracting the code and putting it into a separate template, you can use template fragments to render just that part of that template:

page = Papercraft.html {
  div {
    h1 'Page title'
    p 'Some text'
  }
  div(id: 'my-form') {
    fragment(:form) {
      form {
        input(name: 'email')
        button 'OK'
      }
    }
  }
}
page.render_fragment(:form)

For more information on how to use template fragments, see the HTMX article.

Plain Procs as Templates

With Papercraft you can write a template as a plain Ruby proc, and later render it by passing it as a block to Papercraft.html:

greeting = proc { |name| h1 "Hello, #{name}!" }
Papercraft.html(&greeting).render('world')

Components can also be expressed using lambda notation:

greeting = ->(name) { h1 "Hello, #{name}!" }
Papercraft.html(&greeting).render('world')

Template Composition

Papercraft makes it easy to compose multiple templates into a whole HTML document. A Papercraft template can contain other templates, as the following example shows.

Title = ->(title) { h1 title }

Item = ->(id:, text:, checked:) {
  li {
    input name: id, type: 'checkbox', checked: checked
    label text, for: id
  }
}

ItemList = ->(items) {
  ul {
    items.each { |i|
      Item(**i)
    }
  }
}

page = Papercraft.html { |title, items|
  html5 {
    head { Title(title) }
    body { ItemList(items) }
  }
}

page.render('Hello from composed templates', [
  { id: 1, text: 'foo', checked: false },
  { id: 2, text: 'bar', checked: true }
])

In addition to using templates defined as constants, you can also use non-constant templates by invoking the #emit method:

greeting = -> { span "Hello, world" }

Papercraft.html {
  div {
    emit greeting
  }
}

Parameter and Block Application

Parameters and blocks can be applied to a template without it being rendered, by using #apply. This mechanism is what allows template composition and the creation of higher-order templates.

The #apply method returns a new template which applies the given parameters and or block to the original template:

# parameter application
hello = Papercraft.html { |name| h1 "Hello, #{name}!" }
hello_world = hello.apply('world')
hello_world.render #=> "<h1>Hello, world!</h1>"

# block application
div_wrap = Papercraft.html { div { emit_yield } }
wrapped_h1 = div_wrap.apply { h1 'hi' }
wrapped_h1.render #=> "<div><h1>hi</h1></div>"

# wrap a template
wrapped_hello_world = div_wrap.apply(&hello_world)
wrapped_hello_world.render #=> "<div><h1>Hello, world!</h1></div>"

Higher-Order Templates

Papercraft also lets you create higher-order templates, that is, templates that take other templates as parameters, or as blocks. Higher-order templates are handy for creating layouts, wrapping templates in arbitrary markup, enhancing templates or injecting template parameters.

Here is a higher-order template that takes a template as parameter:

div_wrap = Papercraft.html { |inner| div { emit inner } }
greeter = Papercraft.html { h1 'hi' }
wrapped_greeter = div_wrap.apply(greeter)
wrapped_greeter.render #=> "<div><h1>hi</h1></div>"

The inner template can also be passed as a block, as shown above:

div_wrap = Papercraft.html { div { emit_yield } }
wrapped_greeter = div_wrap.apply { h1 'hi' }
wrapped_greeter.render #=> "<div><h1>hi</h1></div>"

Layout Template Composition

One of the principal uses of higher-order templates is the creation of nested layouts. Suppose we have a website with a number of different layouts, and we'd like to avoid having to repeat the same code in the different layouts. We can do this by creating a default page template that takes a block, then use #apply to create the other templates:

default_layout = Papercraft.html { |**params|
  html5 {
    head {
      title: params[:title]
    }
    body {
      emit_yield(**params)
    }
  }
}

article_layout = default_layout.apply { |title:, body:|
  article {
    h1 title
    emit_markdown body
  }
}

article_layout.render(
  title: 'This is a title',
  body: 'Hello from *markdown body*'
)

Emitting Raw HTML

Raw HTML can be emitted using #emit:

wrapped = Papercraft.html { |html| div { emit html } }
wrapped.render("<h1>hi</h1>") #=> "<div><h1>hi</h1></div>"

Emitting a String with HTML Encoding

To emit a string with proper HTML encoding, without wrapping it in an HTML element, use #text:

Papercraft.html { text 'hi&lo' }.render #=> "hi&amp;lo"

Emitting Markdown

Markdown is rendered using the Kramdown gem. To emit Markdown, use #emit_markdown:

template = Papercraft.html { |md| div { emit_markdown md } }
template.render("Here's some *Markdown*") #=> "<div><p>Here's some <em>Markdown</em><p>\n</div>"

Kramdown options can be specified by adding them to the #emit_markdown call:

template = Papercraft.html { |md| div { emit_markdown md, auto_ids: false } }
template.render("# title") #=> "<div><h1>title</h1></div>"

The #emit_markdown method is available only to HTML templates. If you need to render markdown in XML or JSON templates (usually for implementing RSS or JSON feeds), you can use Papercraft.markdown directly:

Papercraft.markdown('# title') #=> "<h1>title</h1>"

The default Kramdown options are:

{
  entity_output: :numeric,
  syntax_highlighter: :rouge,
  input: 'GFM',
  hard_wrap: false  
}

The deafult options can be configured by accessing Papercraft.default_kramdown_options, e.g.:

Papercraft.default_kramdown_options[:auto_ids] = false

Working with MIME Types

Papercraft lets you set and interrogate a template's MIME type, in order to be able to dynamically set the Content-Type HTTP response header. A template's MIME type can be set when creating the template, e.g. Papercraft.xml(mime_type: 'application/rss+xml'). You can interrogate the template's MIME type using #mime_type:

# using Qeweney (https://github.com/digital-fabric/qeweney)
def serve_template(req, template)
  body = template.render
  respond(body, 'Content-Type' => template.mime_type)
end

Deferred Evaluation

Deferred evaluation allows deferring the rendering of parts of a template until the last moment, thus allowing an inner template to manipulate the state of the outer template. To in order to defer a part of a template, use #defer, and include any markup in the provided block. This technique, in in conjunction with holding state in instance variables, is an alternative to passing parameters, which can be limiting in some situations.

A few use cases for deferred evaulation come to mind:

Setting the page title.
Adding a flash message to a page.
Using templates that dynamically add static dependencies (JS and CSS) to the page.

The last use case is particularly interesting. Imagine a DependencyMananger class that can collect JS and CSS dependencies from the different templates integrated into the page, and adds them to the page's <head> element:

default_layout = Papercraft.html { |**args|
  @dependencies = DependencyMananger.new
  head {
    defer { emit @dependencies.head_markup }
  }
  body { emit_yield **args }
}

button = proc { |text, onclick|
  @dependencies.js '/static/js/button.js'
  @dependencies.css '/static/css/button.css'

  button text, onclick: onclick
}

heading = proc { |text|
  @dependencies.js '/static/js/heading.js'
  @dependencies.css '/static/css/heading.css'

  h1 text
}

page = default_layout.apply {
  emit heading, "What's your favorite cheese?"

  emit button, 'Beaufort', 'eat_beaufort()'
  emit button, 'Mont d''or', 'eat_montdor()'
  emit button, 'Époisses', 'eat_epoisses()'
}

HTML Templates

HTML templates include a few HTML-specific methods to facilitate writing modern HTML:

html5 { ... } - emits an HTML 5 DOCTYPE (<!DOCTYPE html>)
import_map(root_path, root_url) - emits an import map including all files matching <root_path>/*.js, based on the given root_url
js_module(js) - emits a <script type="module"> element
link_stylesheet(href, **attributes) - emits a <link rel="stylesheet" ...> element
script(js, **attributes) - emits an inline <script> element
style(css, **attributes) - emits an inline <style> element
versioned_file_href(href, root_path, root_url) - calculates a versioned href for the given file

HTML docs

XML Templates

XML templates behave largely the same as HTML templates, with a few minor differences. XML templates employ a different encoding algorithm, and lack some specific HTML functionality, such as emitting Markdown.

Here's an example showing how to create an RSS feed:

rss = Papercraft.xml(mime_type: 'text/xml; charset=utf-8') { |resource:, **props|
  rss(version: '2.0', 'xmlns:atom' => 'http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom') {
    channel {
      title 'Noteflakes'
      link 'https://noteflakes.com/'
      description 'A website by Sharon Rosner'
      language 'en-us'
      pubDate Time.now.httpdate
      emit '<atom:link href="https://noteflakes.com/feeds/rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />'

      article_entries = resource.page_list('/articles').reverse

      article_entries.each { |e|
        item {
          title e[:title]
          link "https://noteflakes.com#{e[:url]}"
          guid "https://noteflakes.com#{e[:url]}"
          pubDate e[:date].to_time.httpdate
          description e[:html_content]
        }  
      }
    }
  }
}

XML docs

JSON Templates

JSON templates behave largely the same as HTML and XML templates. The only major difference is that for adding array items you'll need to use the #item method:

Papercraft.json {
  item 1
  item 2
  item 3
}.render #=> "[1,2,3]"

Otherwise, you can create arbitrarily complex JSON structures by mixing hashes and arrays:

Papercraft.json {
  foo {
    bar {
      item nil
      item true
      item 123.456
    }
  }
}.render #=> "{\"foo\":{\"bar\":[null,true,123.456]}}"

Papercraft uses the JSON gem under the hood in order to generate actual JSON.

JSON docs

Papercraft Extensions

Papercraft extensions are modules that contain one or more methods that can be used to render complex HTML components. Extension modules can be used by installing them as a namespaced extension using Papercraft::extension. Extensions are particularly useful when you work with CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap, Tailwind or Primer.

For example, to create a Bootstrap card component, the following HTML markup is needed (example taken from the Bootstrap docs):

<div class="card" style="width: 18rem;">
  <div class="card-body">
    <h5 class="card-title">Card title</h5>
    <h6 class="card-subtitle mb-2 text-muted">Card subtitle</h6>
    <p class="card-text">Some quick example text to build on the card title and make up the bulk of the card's content.</p>
    <a href="#" class="card-link">Card link</a>
    <a href="#" class="card-link">Another link</a>
  </div>
</div>

With Papercraft, we could create a Bootstrap extension with a #card method and other associated methods:

module BootstrapComponents
  def card(**props, &block)
    div(class: 'card', **props) {
      div(class: 'card-body', &block)
    }
  end

  def card_title(title)
    h4(title, class: 'card-title')
  end

  def card_subtitle(subtitle)
    h5(subtitle, class: 'card-subtitle')
  end

  def card_text(text)
    p(text, class: 'card-text')
  end

  def card_link(text, **opts)
    a(text, class: 'card-link', **opts)
  end
end

Papercraft.extension(bootstrap: BootstrapComponents)

The call to Papercraft::extension lets us access the different methods of BootstrapComponents by calling #bootstrap inside a template. With this, we'll be able to express the above markup as follows:

Papercraft.html {
  bootstrap.card(style: 'width: 18rem') {
    bootstrap.card_title 'Card title'
    bootstrap.card_subtitle 'Card subtitle'
    bootstrap.card_text 'Some quick example text to build on the card title and make up the bulk of the card''s content.'
    bootstrap.card_link 'Card link', href: '#foo'
    bootstrap.card_link 'Another link', href: '#bar'
  }
}

Extending Specific Templates

Sometimes you wish to extend a specific template locally, without the extension API being available to other templates. To do this you can use #extend:

module CustomTags
  def label(text)
    span text, class: 'label'
  end
end

Papercraft.html {
  extend CustomTags

  label 'foo'
}

The extension is in effect as long as the template is processing, so it is also accessible to any sub templates that are emitted.

Local extensions can also be namespaced by passing #extend a hash mapping namespaces to modules:

Papercraft.html {
  extend custom: CustomTags

  custom.label 'foo'
}

Inline Helper Methods

In addition to proper extensions defined in modules, you can also define individual extension methods inline in your Papercraft templates. You can do this using any of the following techniques:

Define a method in the template body:

Papercraft.html {
  def label(text)
    span text, class: 'label'
  end

  label 'foo'
  label 'bar'
}

Use def_tag to define a custom tag:

Papercraft.html {
  def_tag(:label) { |text| span text, class: 'label' }

  label 'foo'
  label 'bar'
}

Note that using any of the above methods you can also create custom components that take a block with inner HTML:

# using def
def section(title, &inner)
  div {
    h1 title
    emit inner
  }
end

# using def_tag
def_tag(:section) do |title, &inner|
  div {
    h1 title
    emit inner
  }
end

Bundled Extensions

Papercraft comes bundled with a few extensions that address common use cases. All bundled extensions are namespaced under Papercraft::Extensions, and must be specifically required in order to be available to templates.

For all bundled Papercraft extensions, there's no need to call Papercraft.extension, requiring the extension is sufficient.

SOAP Extension

The SOAP extension was contributed by @aemadrid.

The SOAP extension provides common tags for building SOAP payloads. To load the SOAP extensions, require polyphony/extensions/soap. The extension provides the following methods:

soap.Body(...) - emits a soap:Body tag.
soap.Envelope(...) - emits a soap:Envelope tag.
soap.Fault(...) - emits a soap:Fault tag.
soap.Header(...) - emits a soap:Header tag.

As mentioned above, namespaced tags and attributes may be specified by using double underscores for colons. Other tags that contain special characters may be emitted using the #tag method:

require 'polyphony/extensions/soap'

xml = Papercraft.xml {
  soap.Envelope(
    xmlns__xsd: 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema',
    xmlns__xsi: 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'
  ) {
    soap.Body {
      PosRequest(xmlns: 'http://Some.Site') {
        tag('Ver1.0') {
          Header {
            SecretAPIKey 'some_secret_key'
          }
          Transaction {
            SomeData {}
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

SOAP docs

API Reference

The API reference for this library can be found here.