Little HTML templating server

Description

This is a demo of a small HTMl templating server. Its purpose is to fill html templates with data from a JSON file. It has 4 components :

• DemoTemplating.JsonServer : A nginx web server that serves static JSON files
• DemoTemplating.Api : An ASP.NET Core api that contains the HTML templates, and a single route for filling them
• DemoTemplating.RendererLib : A rendering library that uses RazorEngine to render the HTML files with the JSON data
• DemoTemplating.Cli : A Command Line Interface that can be used to render the HTML without calling the api

Building and running the server

A single script start.sh takes care of building the docker images and running them. As long as you have Docker installed, all you need to do is run the script and everything will be ready.

Rendering templates with the api

HTML templates must be placed in the DemoTemplating.Api/Templates folder and have the .html extension. JSON files must be placed in the DemoTemplating.JsonServer folder and have the .json extension. To render HTML templates and fill them with JSON data, simply call the /templating/{htmlFileName}/{jsonFileName} route. By default, the api will run on port 80 and a few examples of HTML and JSON files are already present. If you want to test it, you can go to http://localhost/templating/hello/name1 and see the result. This call will :

• get the HTML file hello.html from the template folder
• get the name1.json file from the nginx server
• fill the HTML placeholders with the data from the JSON file
• send the resulting HTML back

Rendering templates with the cli

Console app (.NET Core). Templating Cli render the html with the json passed as arguments of the command line and display it in browser.

This command line takes 3 arguments, an html file, a json file and a result html file

./DemoTemplating.Cli.exe hello.html name1.json outputfile.html

Using the templating with BrowserSync

By running the templating server with BrowserSync, you can easily modify the templates and json files on the fly. The browser will automatically reload when one file is changed. In order to run the demo with BrowserSync, you have to :

• Edit the start-with-browser-sync.sh file located at the root of the repository. Change the value of the 2 variables localJsonFolder and localTemplateFolder to make them point at your local folder containing the json files and the templates files respectively. This step is needed because absolute paths are required in order to mount the correct directory in the docker container.
• Start the script start-with-browser-sync.sh
• This will create another web server on port 3000 which will watch any file modification and refresh the browser if needed. To see how it works, you can go to http://localhost:3000/templating/hello/name1 and try to edit the hello.html template.

Benchmarking the templating server

In order to benchmark the templating server, you can use the demo-templating-benchmark docker image that is built when running the start.sh script. This image contains 2 benchmarking tools :

• wrk
• ab

You can use the benchmark image in 3 different ways :

• Simply by running the start-benchmark.sh script that will take care of running the image for you. It will start a benchmark test for 10 seconds on the url http://demo-templating-api/templating/hello/name1 by using 2 threads and 100 simultaneous connections.
• You can specify the command to run as the image parameter. For example, to run the same simulation as the default one, use docker run --rm --network=templating --name demo-templating-benchmark demo-templating-benchmark wrk -t2 -d10s -c100 --latency http://demo-templating-api/templating/hello/name1
• You can also start the image as an interactive container to type your commands inside it directly: docker run --rm -it --network=templating --name demo-templating-benchmark demo-templating-benchmark /bin/sh. Then you can use wrk and ab with any parameter you want.

Simple form validation demo

The api also includes a basic html form with server-side validation. To start the api, either run start.sh which will run all containers, or start-api-only.sh which will only run the api container. You can then navigate to http://localhost/form/login to view the login form. When submitted via the Go button, the same form will appear with an additional invalid class to inputs that did not pass the validation. Right now, the validation is very basic : both inputs need to be between 3 and 50 characters.