Ruby – Nesting Layouts in Sinatra

erbrubysinatra

tl;dr: is there a clean way to nest layouts in Sinatra?

For all pages on my site, I have a common layout.erb which renders a header, a footer, and some other bits.

For a subset of those pages, I would like to use an inner layout which renders a left menu in addition to those common bits.

globally

erb :pageTemplate executes layout.erb, where yield executes pageTemplate

in the subset

erb :pageTemplate executes layout.erb, where yield executes specificLayout.erb, where yield executes pageTemplate.

make sense?

I am open to separate classes, before statements, and any other ruby magic. I am not looking for adding header/footer partials and including them in each layout.

Best Answer

Found it! http://www.sinatrarb.com/intro.html#Templates%20with%20%3Ccode%3Eyield%3C/code%3E%20and%20nested%20layouts

erb :site_layout, :layout => false do
  erb :region_layout do
    erb :page
  end
end

now, :site_layout can contain the header and footer, :region_layout can contain left navigation, and :page only has to worry about the page content!

Related Solutions

Ruby – How to get Sinatra to auto-reload the file after each change

See the Sinatra FAQ,

"How do I make my Sinatra app reload on changes?"

First off, in-process code reloading in Ruby is hard and having a solution that works for every scenario is technically impossible.

Which is why we recommend you to do out-of-process reloading.

First you need to install rerun if you haven’t already:
 $ gem install rerun
Now if you start your Sinatra app like this:
$ ruby app.rb
All you have to do for reloading is instead do this:
$ rerun 'ruby app.rb'
If you are for instance using rackup, instead do the following:

$ rerun 'rackup'

You get the idea.

If you still want in-process reloading, check out Sinatra::Reloader.

Ruby – Serving static files with Sinatra

You can use the send_file helper to serve files.

require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
  send_file File.join(settings.public_folder, 'index.html')
end

This will serve index.html from whatever directory has been configured as having your application's static files.