https://www.pistack.xyz/tags/templating/ Recent content in Templating on Pi Stack Hugo en-us Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.pistack.xyz/posts/2026-08-17-javascript-template-engines-ejs-pug-nunjucks-comparison/ Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.pistack.xyz/posts/2026-08-17-javascript-template-engines-ejs-pug-nunjucks-comparison/ <p>Your Express server needs to render HTML. You can concatenate strings — for about a week, until you need layouts, includes, conditionals, and HTML escaping that actually works. That is what template engines are for, and Node.js has three serious candidates: <strong>EJS (8,117 stars), Pug (21,853 stars), and Nunjucks (8,984 stars)</strong>. They look interchangeable at a glance — they all take data and produce HTML — but they differ so much in syntax, safety defaults, and ecosystem fit that picking the wrong one will cost you either a debugging week or a security review.</p>