A simple and very stupid template engine.

It executes scripts embedded in template files and substitutes their output in-place.

templa processes template files and generates output files according to the following principle:

Any segment of a file between a line that starts with #! (a shebang, possibly indented) and a line that ends with !# (or the end of the file) is considered an embedded script.

This embedded script is isolated in a temporary file, with the proper amount of indentation removed and the final !# stripped, and then executed. The standard output of that program is added to the output file, replacing the embedded script.

A literal #! can be escaped with ##!.

<h1>Files</h1>
<ul>
    #!/bin/bash
    for file in *; do
        printf '<li>%s</li>\n' "$file"
    done !#
</ul>

<h1>Files</h1>
<ul>
    <li>LICENSE</li>
    <li>Makefile</li>
    <li>README.md</li>
    <li>templa</li>
    <li>templates</li>
</ul>

To see a live example, check out templates/README.md.

templa requires Bash version 4 or later, as well as GNU coreutils. These should be present on most GNU/Linux systems.

Clone this repository on your system and copy the templa executable to some location in your PATH, e.g. /usr/local/bin or ~/.bin.

Usage: templa [-qh] [-t target] templates...
    Render the templates from TEMPLATES to the TARGET directory.

Options:
    -t  Choose the target directory. By default, the current directory is used.
        If - is given, render everything to standard output.
    -v  Verbose mode, print file names to standard output before rendering them.
    -q  Quiet mode, don't print errors.
    -h  Show this help message.