WTH can't we use a more powerful templating language like ERB?

Month of "What the heck?!"
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I’ve been very busy recently with a complete rewrite of most of my HA config and I’ve gotten so tired of Jinja2 that I need to write this topic.

In the python world Jinja2 is the de facto standard, but it pales in comparison to Ruby’s ERB. The latter being a templating engine that can evaluate raw ruby code and supports template partials (imaging being able to pass variables to a template :slight_smile: ). It would make using templates so much more powerful and enjoyable.
I wouldn’t mind a templating engine that can evaluate raw python code – anything to get rid of jinja2 – but AFAIK that’s not really a thing?

I know it won’t be a popular suggestion in a pthon project, but if we could have a Ruby API and template renderer that would be great. For the Ruby API: it’s very easy to directly call python code from ruby, so that shouldn’t be a big effort :wink:

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Maybe this will be more your style:

https://hacs-pyscript.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

You can do this with jinja templates.

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You can do this just about everywhere templates are allowed. I’m curious what you actually mean with this phrase. Do you have an example?

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My mistake, that part was a bit ignorant regarding jinja. The core of my suggestion is about having the power of a full programming language in templates. It’s very much comparable with ESPHome where one can add straightforward C++ lambdas instead of having to juggle with a pseudo-language.

1 Like
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There’s pyscript (python), appdaemon (python), netdaemon (C#).

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I posted this some while ago Global template variables

and that would be what poster here asks? global variables per template: sensor, and not having to declare those per individual template inside those.

Using the this variable comes somewhat close, but its not as powerful just yet

So yes, a big +1 for that request.

btw @clayhill you should vote :wink:

and no, still not complaining…