Passing binding or arguments to ERB from the command line

ruby templates erb
scott_fakename picture scott_fakename · Jul 27, 2013 · Viewed 11.4k times · Source

I have been playing around with erb from the command line recently. I wanted to make a dirt simple erb template, for example the following:

<%- name = "Joe"; quality = "fantastic" -%>
Hello. My name is <%= name %>. I hope your day is <%= quality %>.

This works if I run

erb -T - thatfile.erb

what I want to do is to make name and quality be passable from command line arguments, so that I could do something like:

./thatfile.erb "Bill" "super"

from the bash prompt and do the same thing.

I am aware that I could write a ruby script that would just read that template in and then use ERB.new(File.read("thatfile.erb")).result(binding), or writing the template after an END and doing likewise, but I'm looking for a more lightweight approach if it exists, because I don't want to write two files for each erb script that I create for this purpose.

Answer

James Lim picture James Lim · May 4, 2015

Alternatively, you can use a ruby script and load it in as a library.

# vars.rb
@hello = 'kirk'

# template.html.erb
<div><%= @hello %></div>

$ erb -r './vars' template.html.erb

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