Welcome to Stencil’s documentation!

Contents:

• Writing Templates
  • Expressions
  • Comments
  • Variables
  • Block Tags
• Using Templates
  • From Strings
  • From a file
  • Context
  • Rendering
  • Escaping
• Extending stencil
  • Tags

Why?

There are plenty of template engines in Python, and I’ve even written my own powerful, super-fast one (knights-templater), so why write another?

I was experimenting with AWS’ Serverless concept, and was saddened to learn it only supports Python 2.7 currently. I wanted templating, but felt back-porting K-T to Py2 just wasn’t warranted.

So I figured, why not see how small I can make a functional template language?

Apparently, “under 400 lines of code” is the answer…

Since then AWS Lambda picked up support for Python3, and stencil has grown considerably - in features, more than code size.