minicli/stencil¶
/ˈstɛns(ə)l/ (noun): a thin sheet of card, plastic, or metal with a pattern or letters cut out of it, used to produce the cut design on the surface below by the application of ink or paint through the holes.
Minicli/Stencil is a dummy content replacer useful for generating templates.
Stencils are like lightweight templates with no advanced functionality (so it's not an engine). It simply replaces placeholders with content set up in a string-indexed array or dictionary.
If you are looking for a templating system for front-end views, this is not it! Go check Twig. Stencil is useful for generating skeleton content (such as to auto-generate classes, Markdown docs and other files following a certain structure).
Dependencies¶
Stencil is a tiny standalone library that has only testing dependencies.
Usage¶
Within Minicli¶
If you want to use Stencil within a Minicli app, you should have a look at the Minicli Stencil command that contains a basic implementation of a command using Stencil to generate documents based on templates. Check that repo for usage instructions.
Standalone¶
For more freedom to include Stencil on your codebase, install standalone Stencil via Composer:
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Set up a directory within your project to hold your stencils:
Create a new .tpl
file with some variables:
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From your project, instantiate a new Stencil, passing along the stencils directory you set up. Then, call the applyTemplate
method with an array containing your values:
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Querying templates for variables¶
You can also obtain the variables set within a template in order to build your array of values in a step-by-step way, such as interactively via command-line prompts.
This is an example code that collects variables from a Stencil template and then prompts users for each variable found, returning an array that can then be used with $stencil->applyTemplate()
: