zola/docs/content/documentation/templates/overview.md

+++ title = “Overview” weight = 10 +++

Zola uses the Tera template engine and is very similar to Jinja2, Liquid or Twig.

As this documentation will only talk about how templates work in Zola, please read the Tera template documentation if you want to learn more about it first.

All templates live in the templates directory. If you are not sure what variables are available in a template, you can just stick {{ __tera_context }} in it to print the whole context.

A few variables are available on all templates minus RSS and sitemap:

• config: the configuration without any modifications
• current_path: the path (full URL without the base_url) of the current page, never starting with a /
• current_url: the full URL for that page
• lang: the language for that page, null if the page/section doesn't have a language set

The 404 template does not get current_path and current_url as it cannot know it.

Standard Templates

By default, Zola will look for three templates: index.html, which is applied to the site homepage; section.html, which is applied to all sections (any HTML page generated by creating a directory within your content directory); and page.html, which is applied to all pages (any HTML page generated by creating a .md file within your content directory).

The homepage is always a section (regardless of whether it contains other pages). Thus, the index.html and section.html templates both have access to the section variables. The page.html template has access to the page variables. The page and section variables are described in more detail in the next section of this documentation.

Built-in Templates

Zola comes with three built-in templates: rss.xml, sitemap.xml, and robots.txt (each described in their own section of this documentation). Additionally, themes can add their own templates, which will be applied if not overridden. You can override built-in or theme templates by creating a template with same name in the correct path. For example, you can override the RSS template by creating a templates/rss.xml file.

Custom Templates

In addition to the standard index.html, section.html, and page.html templates, you may also create custom templates by creating a .html file in the templates directory. These custom templates will not be used by default. Instead, the custom template will only be used if you apply it by setting the template front-matter variable to the path for that template (or if you include it in another template that is applied). For example, if you created a custom template for your site's About page called about.html, you could apply it to your about.md page by including the following front matter in your about.md page:

+++
title = "About Us"
template = "about.html"
+++

Custom templates are not required to live at the root of your templates directory. For example, product_pages/with_pictures.html is a valid template.

Built-in filters

Zola adds a few filters, in addition of the ones ones already present in Tera.

markdown

Converts the given variable to HTML using Markdown. This doesn't apply any of the features that Zola adds to Markdown: internal links, shortcodes etc won't work.

By default, the filter will wrap all text into a paragraph. To disable that, you can pass true to the inline argument:

{{ some_text | markdown(inline=true) }}

base64_encode

Encode the variable to base64.

base64_decode

Decode the variable from base64.

Built-in global functions

Zola adds a few global functions to those in Tera in order to make it easier to develop complex sites.

get_page

Takes a path to a .md file and returns the associated page

{% set page = get_page(path="blog/page2.md") %}

get_section

Takes a path to a _index.md file and returns the associated section

{% set section = get_section(path="blog/_index.md") %}

If you only need the metadata of the section, you can pass metadata_only=true to the function:

{% set section = get_section(path="blog/_index.md", metadata_only=true) %}

get_url

Gets the permalink for the given path. If the path starts with @/, it will be understood as an internal link like the ones used in markdown, starting from the root content directory.

{% set url = get_url(path="@/blog/_index.md") %}

This can also be used to get the permalinks for static assets for example if we want to link to the file that is located at static/css/app.css:

{{/* get_url(path="css/app.css") */}}

By default, assets will not have a trailing slash. You can force one by passing trailing_slash=true to the get_url function. An example is:

{{/* get_url(path="css/app.css", trailing_slash=true) */}}

In the case of non-internal links, you can also add a cachebust of the format ?t=1290192 at the end of a URL by passing cachebust=true to the get_url function.

get_taxonomy_url

Gets the permalink for the taxonomy item found.

{% set url = get_taxonomy_url(kind="categories", name=page.taxonomies.category) %}

The name will almost come from a variable but in case you want to do it manually, the value should be the same as the one in the front-matter, not the slugified version.

get_taxonomy

Gets the whole taxonomy of a specific kind.

{% set categories = get_taxonomy(kind="categories") %}

load_data

Loads data from a file or URL. Supported file types include toml, json and csv. Any other file type will be loaded as plain text.

The path argument specifies the path to the data file relative to your base directory, where your config.toml is. As a security precaution, If this file is outside of the main site directory, your site will fail to build.

{% set data = load_data(path="content/blog/story/data.toml") %}

The optional format argument allows you to specify and override which data type is contained within the file specified in the path argument. Valid entries are toml, json, csv or plain. If the format argument isn't specified, then the paths extension is used.

{% set data = load_data(path="content/blog/story/data.txt", format="json") %}

Use the plain format for when your file has a toml/json/csv extension but you want to load it as plain text.

For toml and json the data is loaded into a structure matching the original data file, however for csv there is no native notion of such a structure. Instead the data is separated into a data structure containing headers and records. See the example below to see how this works.

In the template:

{% set data = load_data(path="content/blog/story/data.csv") %}

In the content/blog/story/data.csv file:

Number, Title
1,Gutenberg
2,Printing

The equivalent json value of the parsed data would be stored in the data variable in the template:

{
    "headers": ["Number", "Title"],
    "records": [
        ["1", "Gutenberg"],
        ["2", "Printing"]
    ],
}

Remote content

Instead of using a file, you can load data from a remote URL. This can be done by specifying a url parameter to load_data rather than path.

{% set response = load_data(url="https://api.github.com/repos/getzola/zola") %}
{{ response }}

By default, the response body will be returned with no parsing. This can be changed by using the format argument as below.

{% set response = load_data(url="https://api.github.com/repos/getzola/zola", format="json") %}
{{ response }}

Data Caching

Data file loading and remote requests are cached in memory during build, so multiple requests aren't made to the same endpoint. URLs are cached based on the URL, and data files are cached based on the files modified time. The format is also taken into account when caching, so a request will be sent twice if it's loaded with 2 different formats.

trans

Gets the translation of the given key, for the default_language or the language given

{{/* trans(key="title") */}}
{{/* trans(key="title", lang="fr") */}}

resize_image

Resizes an image file. Pease refer to Content / Image Processing for complete documentation.