A Jade Tutorial for Beginners

August 20, 2017 (7y ago)

Jade is an elegant templating engine, primarily used for server-side templating in NodeJS. In plain words, Jade gives you a powerful new way to write markup, with a number of advantages over plain HTML.

For example, take a look at this movie card in HTML:

<div>
  <h1>Ocean's Eleven</h1>
  <ul>
    <li>Comedy</li>
    <li>Thriller</li>
  </ul>
  <p>
    Danny Ocean and his eleven accomplices plan to rob three Las Vegas casinos
    simultaneously.
  </p>
</div>

This is what the same markup looks like in Jade:

div
  h1 Ocean's Eleven
  ul
    li Comedy
    li Thriller
  p.
    Danny Ocean and his eleven accomplices plan to rob
    three Las Vegas casinos simultaneously.

The Jade version is elegant and concise. But it’s not just about the beautiful syntax. Jade has some really neat features, allowing you to write modular and reusable markup. Before we get into these powerful features, let’s do a quick overview of the basics.

The Basics

I’m going to highlight three basic features in Jade

If you want to try this out as we go along, you can use CodePen and choose Jade as your HTML preprocessor or use the online compiler on the official Jade page to compile your Jade to HTML.

Simple Tags

As you might have noticed earlier, there are no “closing” tags in Jade. Instead, Jade uses indentation (i.e. white space) to determine how tags are nested.

div
  p Hello!
  p World!

In the example above, since the paragraph tags are indented, they will end up inside the div tag. Simple!

<div>
  <p>Hello!</p>
  <p>World!</p>
</div>

Jade compiles this accurately by treating the first word on each line as a tag, while subsequent words on that line are treated as text inside the tag.

View this example on CodePen

Attributes

All this is great, but how do we add attributes to our tags? Quite simple really. Let’s go back to our first example and toss in some classes and a poster image.

div(class="movie-card", id="oceans-11")
  h1(class="movie-title") Ocean's 11
  img(src="/img/oceans-11.png", class="movie-poster")
  ul(class="genre-list")
    li Comedy
    li Thriller

Pretty neat right?

<div class="movie-card" id="oceans-11">
  <h1 class="movie-title">Ocean's 11</h1>
  <img src="/img/oceans-11.png" class="movie-poster" />
  <ul class="genre-list">
    <li>Comedy</li>
    <li>Thriller</li>
  </ul>
</div>

View this example on CodePen

But it doesn’t stop here. Jade provides special shorthand for IDs and classes, further simplifying our markup using a familiar notation:

div.movie-card#oceans-11
  h1.movie-title Ocean's 11
  img.movie-poster(src="/img/oceans-11.png")
  ul.genre-list
    li Comedy
    li Thriller

View this example on CodePen

As you can see, Jade uses the same syntax as that which we’re already familiar with when writing CSS selectors, making it even easier to spot classes.

Blocks of Text

Let’s say you have a paragraph tag and you want to place a large block of text in it. Jade treats the first word of every line as an HTML tag – so what do you do?

You might have noticed an innocent period in the first code example in this article. Adding a period (full stop) after your tag indicates that everything inside that tag is text and Jade stops treating the first word on each line as an HTML tag.

div
  p How are you?
  p.
    I'm fine thank you.
    And you? I heard you fell into a lake?
    That's rather unfortunate. I hate it when my shoes get wet.

View this example on CodePen

And just to drive home the point, if I were to remove the period after the p tag in this example, the compiled HTML would treat the “I” in the word “I’m” as an opening tag (in this case, it would be the <i> tag).

Powerful Features

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s take a peek at some powerful features that will make your markup smarter. We’ll look at the following features in remainder of this tutorial:

Using JavaScript in Jade

Jade is implemented with JavaScript, so it’s super-easy to use JavaScript in Jade. Here’s an example.

- var x = 5;
div
  ul
    - for (var i=1; i<=x; i++) {
      li Hello
    - }

What did we just do here?! By starting a line with a hyphen, we indicate to the Jade compiler that we want to start using JavaScript and it just works as we would expect. Here’s what you get when you compile the Jade code above to HTML:

<div>
  <ul>
    <li>Hello</li>
    <li>Hello</li>
    <li>Hello</li>
    <li>Hello</li>
    <li>Hello</li>
  </ul>
</div>

View this example on CodePen

We use a hyphen when the code doesn’t directly add output. If we want to use JavaScript to output something in Jade, we use =. Let’s tweak the code above to show a serial number.

- var x = 5;
div
  ul
    - for (var i=1; i<=x; i++) {
      li= i + ". Hello"
    - }

And voilà, we now have serial numbers:

<div>
  <ul>
    <li>1\. Hello</li>
    <li>2\. Hello</li>
    <li>3\. Hello</li>
    <li>4\. Hello</li>
    <li>5\. Hello</li>
  </ul>
</div>

View this example on CodePen

Of course, in this case, an ordered list would be much more appropriate, but you get the point. Now, if you’re worried about XSS and HTML escaping, read the docs for more info.

Loops

Jade provides an excellent looping syntax so that you don’t need to resort to JavaScript. Let’s loop over an array:

- var droids = ["R2D2", "C3PO", "BB8"];
div
  h1 Famous Droids from Star Wars
  for name in droids
    div.card
      h2= name

And this will compile as follows:

<div>
  <h1>Famous Droids from Star Wars</h1>
  <div class="card">
    <h2>R2D2</h2>
  </div>
  <div class="card">
    <h2>C3PO</h2>
  </div>
  <div class="card">
    <h2>BB8</h2>
  </div>
</div>

View this example on CodePen

You can iterate over objects and use while loops too. Check out the docs for more.

Interpolation

It can get annoying to mix JavaScript into text like this p= "Hi there, " + profileName + ". How are you doing?". Does Jade have an elegant solution for this? You bet.

- var profileName = "Danny Ocean";
div
  p Hi there, #{profileName}. How are you doing?

View this example on CodePen

Isn’t that neat?

Mixins

Mixins are like functions. They take parameters as input and give markup as output. Mixins are defined using the mixin keyword.

mixin thumbnail(imageName, caption)
  div.thumbnail
    img(src="/img/#{imageName}.jpg")
    h4.image-caption= caption

Once the mixin is defined, you can call the mixin with the + syntax.

+thumbnail("oceans-eleven", "Danny Ocean makes an elevator pitch.")
+thumbnail("pirates", "Introducing Captain Jack Sparrow!")

Which will output HTML like this:

<div class="thumbnail">
  <img src="/img/oceans-eleven.jpg" />
  <h4 class="image-caption">Danny Ocean makes an elevator pitch.</h4>
</div>
<div class="thumbnail">
  <img src="/img/pirates.jpg" />
  <h4 class="image-caption">Introducing Captain Jack Sparrow!</h4>
</div>

Putting It All Together

Let’s put together everything we’ve learned so far. Say we have a nice array of movies, with each item containing the movie’s title, the cast (a sub-array), the rating, the genre, a link to the IMDB page and the image path for the movie’s poster. The array will look something like this (white space added for readability):

- var movieList = [
  {
    title: "Ocean's Eleven",
    cast: ["Julia Roberts", "George Clooney", "Brad Pitt", "Andy Garcia"],
    genres: ["Comedy", "Thriller"],
    posterImage: "/img/oceans-eleven",
    imdbURL: "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240772/",
    rating: 7
  }
  // etc...
];

We have 10 movies and we want to build nice movie cards for each of them. Initially, we don’t plan to use the IMDB link. If a movie is rated above 5, we give it a thumbs up, otherwise, we give it a thumbs down. We’ll use all the nice features of Jade to write some modular code to do the following:

  1. Create a mixin for a movie card
    • Iterate through the cast list and display the actors. We’ll do the same with genres.
    • Check the rating and decide whether to display a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
  2. Iterate through the movie list and use the mixin to create one card per movie.

So let’s create the mixin first.

mixin movie-card(movie)
  div.movie-card
    h2.movie-title= movie.title
    img.movie-poster(src=movie.posterImage)
    h3 Cast
    ul.cast
      each actor in movie.cast
        li= actor
    div.rating
      if movie.rating > 5
        img(src="img/thumbs-up")
      else
        img(src="img/thumbs-down")
    ul.genre
      each genre in movie.genres
        li= genre

There’s a lot going on up there, but I’m sure it looks familiar – we’ve covered all this in this tutorial. Now, we just need to use our mixin in a loop:

for movie in movieList
  +movie-card(movie)

That’s it. Is that elegant or what? Here’s the final code.

- var movieList = [
  {
    title: "Ocean's Eleven",
    cast: ["Julia Roberts", "George Clooney", "Brad Pitt", "Andy Garcia"],
    genres: ["Comedy", "Thriller"],
    posterImage: "/img/oceans-eleven",
    imdbURL: "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240772/",
    rating: 9.2
  },
  {
    title: "Pirates of the Caribbean",
    cast: ["Johnny Depp", "Keira Knightley", "Orlando Bloom"],
    genres: ["Adventure", "Comedy"],
    posterImage: "/img/pirates-caribbean",
    imdbURL: "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325980/",
    rating: 9.7
  }
];

mixin movie-card(movie)
  div.movie-card
    h2.movie-title= movie.title
    img.movie-poster(src=movie.posterImage)
    h3 Cast
    ul.cast
    each actor in movie.cast
      li= actor
    div.rating
      if movie.rating > 5
        img(src="img/thumbs-up")
      else
        img(src="img/thumbs-down")
    ul.genre
      each genre in movie.genres
        li= genre

for movie in movieList
  +movie-card(movie)

And here’s the compiled HTML:

<div class="movie-card">
  <h2 class="movie-title">Ocean's Eleven</h2>
  <img src="/img/oceans-eleven" class="movie-poster" />
  <h3>Cast</h3>
  <ul class="cast">
    <li>Julia Roberts</li>
    <li>George Clooney</li>
    <li>Brad Pitt</li>
    <li>Andy Garcia</li>
  </ul>
  <div class="rating">
    <img src="img/thumbs-up" />
  </div>
  <ul class="genre">
    <li>Comedy</li>
    <li>Thriller</li>
  </ul>
</div>
<div class="movie-card">
  <h2 class="movie-title">Pirates of the Carribean</h2>
  <img src="/img/pirates-caribbean" class="movie-poster" />
  <h3>Cast</h3>
  <ul class="cast">
    <li>Johnny Depp</li>
    <li>Keira Knightley</li>
    <li>Orlando Bloom</li>
  </ul>
  <div class="rating">
    <img src="img/thumbs-up" />
  </div>
  <ul class="genre">
    <li>Adventure</li>
    <li>Comedy</li>
  </ul>
</div>

But wait a minute. What if we now want to go to the movie’s IMDB page when we click on a movie’s title? We can add one line: a(href=movie.imdbURL) to the mixin.

mixin movie-card(movie)
  div.movie-card
    a(href=movie.imdbURL)
      h2.movie-title= movie.title
    img.movie-poster(src=movie.posterImage)
    h3 Cast
    ul.cast
    each actor in movie.cast
      li= actor
    div.rating
      if movie.rating > 5
        img(src="img/thumbs-up")
      else
        img(src="img/thumbs-down")
    ul.genre
      each genre in movie.genres
        li= genre

View this example on CodePen

Conclusion

We went from knowing nothing about Jade to building some beautiful modular movie cards. There’s a lot more to Jade, but I’ve glossed over some concepts to keep things simple. So I hope this tutorial piqued your curiosity to learn more.

Important note: As some of you might already know, Jade has been renamed to Pug due to a software trademark claim. In the future, articles on Jade will use the new name “Pug” or “PugJS”.

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