Skip to content

maragudk/gomponents

Repository files navigation

Tired of complex template languages?

Logo

GoDoc Go codecov Go Report Card

Try HTML components in pure Go.

gomponents are HTML components written in pure Go. They render to HTML 5, and make it easy for you to build reusable components. So you can focus on building your app instead of learning yet another templating language.

go get maragu.dev/gomponents

Made with ✨sparkles✨ by maragu.

Does your company depend on this project? Contact me at [email protected] to discuss options for a one-time or recurring invoice to ensure its continued thriving.

Features

Check out www.gomponents.com for an introduction.

  • Build reusable HTML components
  • Write declarative HTML 5 in Go without all the strings, so you get
    • Type safety from the compiler
    • Auto-completion from the IDE
    • Easy debugging with the standard Go debugger
    • Automatic formatting with gofmt/goimports
  • Simple API that's easy to learn and use (you know most already if you know HTML)
  • Useful helpers like
    • Text and Textf that insert HTML-escaped text,
    • Raw and Rawf for inserting raw strings,
    • Map for mapping data to components and Group for grouping components,
    • and If/Iff for conditional rendering.
  • No external dependencies
  • Mature and stable, no breaking changes

Usage

go get maragu.dev/gomponents
package main

import (
	. "maragu.dev/gomponents"
	. "maragu.dev/gomponents/components"
	. "maragu.dev/gomponents/html"
)

func Navbar(authenticated bool, currentPath string) Node {
	return Nav(
		NavbarLink("/", "Home", currentPath),
		NavbarLink("/about", "About", currentPath),
		If(authenticated, NavbarLink("/profile", "Profile", currentPath)),
	)
}

func NavbarLink(href, name, currentPath string) Node {
	return A(Href(href), Classes{"is-active": currentPath == href}, g.Text(name))
}

(Some people don't like dot-imports, and luckily it's completely optional.)

For a more complete example, see the examples directory. There's also the gomponents-starter-kit for a full application template.

Architecture

gomponents is organized into several packages:

  • gomponents: Core interfaces and functions like Node, El, Attr, and helpers like Map, Group, If, Text, Raw.
  • gomponents/html: HTML elements and attributes.
  • gomponents/components: Higher-level components and utilities.
  • gomponents/http: HTTP-related utilities for web servers.

Void Elements

Void elements in HTML (like <br>, <img>, <input>) don't have closing tags. gomponents handles these correctly by checking against an internal list of void elements during rendering. When you create a void element, any child nodes that are not attributes will be ignored automatically to ensure valid HTML output.

Performance Considerations

gomponents renders directly to an io.Writer, making it efficient for server-side rendering. The library avoids unnecessary allocations where possible.

FAQ

Is gomponents production-ready?

Yes! gomponents is mature, stable, fully tested with 100% coverage, and has been used in production by myself and many others.

Should I choose html/template, Templ, or gomponents?

These are all good choices, and it largely comes down to preference. I wrote gomponents because I didn't like how I think it's hard to pass data around between templates in html/template. gomponents is pure Go, with no extra build step like Templ, so it works with all tools that already support Go.

That said, both html/template and Templ will do the same thing as gomponents in the end. Try them all and choose what you like!

I don't like how HTML looks in Go.

First of all, that's not a question. 😉

More seriously, think of gomponents like a DSL for HTML. You're building UI components. Give it a day, and it'll feel natural.

What's up with the specially named elements and attributes?

Unfortunately, there are some name clashes in HTML elements and attributes, so they need an El or Attr suffix, to be able to co-exist in the same package in Go.

I've chosen one or the other based on what I think is the common usage. In either case, the less-used variant also exists in the codebase:

  • cite (Cite/CiteAttr, CiteEl also exists)
  • data (DataEl/Data, DataAttr also exists)
  • form (Form/FormAttr, FormEl also exists)
  • label (Label/LabelAttr, LabelEl also exists)
  • style (StyleEl/Style, StyleAttr also exists)
  • title (TitleEl/Title, TitleAttr also exists)