README

The goal of the MiniTPL template engine is to provide a miniature framework which allows you to rapidly create and consume Smarty-like templates without adding the overhead of Smarty to your choice of a PHP framework.

In benchmarks the speed of Mini TPL is very close to PHP itself. All that is usually needed for Mini TPL is a 3KB PHP code overhead. So it beats Smarty, and usual PHP vsprintf and str_replace functionality.

With a total size of about 13KB and the functionality contained, this is one of the smallest full featured template engines for PHP to date.

MiniTPL is available on packagist as titpetric/minitpl.

To start using MiniTPL in your project with composer:

composer require titpetric/minitpl:^1.3

You can start using MiniTPL right away.

<?php

include("vendor/autoload.php");

$tpl = new MiniTPL\Template;

$tpl->load("test.tpl");
$tpl->render();

The classes live in the MiniTPL namespace: MiniTPL\Template, MiniTPL\Compiler and MiniTPL\Hook. Compiler and Hook are usable stand-alone; Template is the entrypoint you normally want.

Compiled templates are written to a templates_c/ directory next to the templates/ directory, so the default Template needs a writable project directory and no configuration. set_compile_location() moves them.

Command line

cmd/minitpl compiles and renders templates without a php script of your own. It is a phpscript script with a #!/usr/bin/env phpscript shebang and runs from a checkout of the repository, after composer install: it loads vendor/autoload.php from the root of the clone.

# run it through phpscript, or directly when the script is executable
phpscript cmd/minitpl compile templates
./cmd/minitpl compile templates

# transpile every template under templates/ into templates_c/
./cmd/minitpl compile templates

# render a template with data from a yaml file
./cmd/minitpl render templates/page.tpl data.yml

# the same, with the data piped in on standard input
cat data.yml | ./cmd/minitpl render templates/page.tpl

phpscript roots its source filesystem at the directory it is started in, so run the command from the checkout and name the templates and data relative to it.

compile keeps the directory structure of the source, resolves {include} against it, and writes each template beside it: templates/ compiles into templates_c/. -o DIR writes elsewhere and -q prints nothing but errors.

render reads a yaml mapping into template variables and prints the result to standard output. The yaml comes from the binding the runtime registers, yaml_decode(), listed by phpscript list --bindings; a runtime without that binding decodes json instead. The command line carries no reader of its own.

Escaping

Printed variables are escaped by default. The compiler scans the template to see where a variable lands, so {title} is escaped in a text node, in an attribute value and in a comment, and left alone inside a <script> or <style> body where html escaping would corrupt the code:

<a href="{news.link}" title="{news.title}">{news.title}</a>

A value that is already markup opts out per tag with {content|raw}, or its {content|unescape} alias. A whole template opts out with the {*noescape*} directive, and a whole Template instance with $tpl->set_escape(false).

This changes compiled output, so a cache written by an earlier version has to be cleared once on upgrade. See docs/minitpl-usage.md for the full rules.

phpscript

The engine and the command line run under phpscript, a PHP interpreter written in Go. phpscript roots its source filesystem at the directory it is started in and reads every path below it, which is why cmd/minitpl loads vendor/autoload.php from the checkout root:

phpscript example.php
phpscript cmd/minitpl help

Testing

The project tries to maintain 100% code coverage. You can verify this by running phpunit --coverage-text, or uncommenting the logging section within phpunit.xml.

titpetric / minitpl

Package info

Security

Statistics

README

Command line

Escaping

phpscript

Testing