Express.js View “globals”

Question

I\'m using Express.js (on Node.js) and I know that you can render a view with custom data via the \"locals\" parameter. (res.render(\"template\", { locals: { foo: \"ba

Answer 1

Express 4

You can access local variables in templates rendered within the application.

So, if you want to use any locals in your template => assuming you have a template engine npm installed to your node/express application.

First, you need to set the express locals objects with your custom variables in your app.js file, you can use an object if multiple values are needed (our case in this post)

 /**
  *  Set locals object
  */

 app.locals.layoutData = { 
  site: {
      title: 'MyWebSiteTitle',
  },   
  metaTag: {
      charset: 'UTF-8',
      description: 'MyDescription',
      keywords: 'keyword-1,keyword-2,...',
      author: 'MyName',
      viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0'
  }
 };

Then, to access the values in the template file layout.pug (in the case of PUG template engine for instance)

doctype html
html
  head
    //title
    title #{locals.layoutData.site.title}
    //Describe metadata
    meta(charset=layoutData.metaTag.charset)
    meta(name='description', content=locals.layoutData.metaTag.description)
    meta(name='keywords', content=locals.layoutData.metaTag.keywords)
    meta(name='author', content=locals.layoutData.metaTag.author)
    meta(name='viewport', content=locals.layoutData.metaTag.viewport)
  body
      block content
      br
      hr
      footer
        p All rights reserved © 2018 |  #{locals.layoutData.site.title}

Tested with

  "dependencies": {
    "express": "^4.16.3",
    "pug": "^2.0.3"
  }