Learning Node.js Development

Rendering templates

In the last couple sections, we looked at multiple ways that we can render HTML using Express. We passed some HTML into response.send, but obviously that was not ideal. It's a real pain to write the markup in a string. We also created a public directory where we can have our static HTML files, such as our help file, and we can serve these up to the browser. Both of those work great but there is a third solution, and that will be the topic in this section. The solution is a templating engine.

A templating engine will let you render HTML but do it in a dynamic way, where we can inject values, such as a username or the current date, inside the template, kind of like we would in Ruby or PHP. Using this templating engine, we'll ...