HandleBars Templating in ExpressJS

Last Updated : 25 Apr, 2025

Handlebars.js is a templating engine similar to the ejs module in node.js, but more powerful and simple to use. It ensures minimum templating and is a logicless engine that keeps the view and the code separated. It can be used with express as the hbs module, available through npm. HandleBars can be used to render web pages to the client side from data on the server side.

Command to install hbs module:

npm i hbs

To use handlebars in express, we need to store HTML code into a .hbs extension in the 'views' folder in the source directory as hbs looks for the pages in the views folder.

The first thing we need to do in the index.js file is to require the hbs module

javascript

const express = require('express')
const hbs = require('hbs')
const app = express()

Now, we need to change the default view engine.

javascript

app.set('view engine', 'hbs')

In case the views directory is undesirable, you can change the view path by the following command:

javascript

app.set('views', <pathname>)

Now let us create a demo.hbs file in our views directory with the following content:

html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <body>
        <p>This is a Demo Page on localhost!</p>
    </body>
</html>

Now, we render our webpage through express to the local server.

javascript

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
    res.render('demo')
})

app.listen(3000);

Now, open your browser and type localhost:3000 on the web address and verify the webpage at your server.

Now we will see how we can dynamically link the pages to server-side data.

In index.js, we declare a demo object, in practice, the object can be a result of the request body and/or database query.

javascript

let demo = {
    name: 'Rohan',
    age: 26
}

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
    res.render('dynamic', { demo: demo })
})

Here we send the demo object as a demo to our hbs page. We can retrieve the information in dynamic.hbs present in the views folder.

HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

<body>
    <p>{{demo.name}} is {{demo.age}} years old.</p>
</body>

</html>

Output:

Rohan is 26 years old

Given multiple values, we can iterate over all of them to perform the same functionality/display for each of the elements.

Let's take an example, add the following code to your index.js and run the server and get a response.

javascript

let projects = {
    name: 'Rahul',
    skills: ['Data Mining', 'BlockChain Dev', 'node.js']
}

app.get('/projects', (req, res) =& gt; {
    res.render('projects', { project: project });
})

where out views/projects.hbs looks something like:

html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

<body>
    {{projects.name}} has the following skills : <br>
    {{#each projects.skills}}
    {{this}} <br>
    {{/each}}
</body>

</html>

Output:

Rahul has the following skills : 
Data Mining
BlockChain Dev
node.js

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HandleBars Templating in ExpressJS

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