Scriban
A fast, powerful, safe and lightweight scripting language and engine for .NET, designed for text templating and general scripting.
What is Scriban?
Scriban is a fast, powerful, safe, and lightweight scripting language and engine for .NET, designed primarily for text templating with compatibility for Liquid templates. It solves the need for a versatile, efficient templating solution that can also serve as a general scripting engine, enabling developers to embed dynamic logic in applications.
.NET developers needing text templating, scripting capabilities, or migrating from Liquid templates, as well as those building applications requiring sandboxed script execution or AOT-compatible libraries.
Developers choose Scriban for its high performance, extensible sandbox model, Liquid compatibility, and robust feature set including async support and AOT readiness, making it a flexible and secure alternative to other .NET templating engines.
Overview
A fast, powerful, safe and lightweight scripting language and engine for .NET
Use Cases
Best For
- Generating dynamic HTML or text content in .NET web applications
- Migrating existing Liquid template projects to a more powerful scripting language
- Embedding a safe, sandboxed scripting engine in .NET desktop or server applications
- Building command-line tools or calculators that require expression evaluation
- Creating custom domain-specific languages (DSLs) within .NET ecosystems
- Developing AOT-compatible .NET libraries that include templating features
Not Ideal For
- Projects requiring strict, unmodified compliance with specific Liquid implementations like Shopify Liquid
- Non-.NET development environments, as Scriban is built for and tightly integrated with the .NET ecosystem
- Teams seeking plug-and-play templating with extensive pre-built UI components or WYSIWYG editors
Pros & Cons
Pros
Parses Liquid templates via Template.ParseLiquid and can convert them to Scriban scripts using Template.ToText, facilitating smooth migration from Liquid-based systems as noted in the README.
Features an efficient lexer/parser and lightweight runtime, optimized for CPU and garbage collector efficiency, making it fast for text templating and scripting.
Provides extensible control over accessible .NET objects and methods through TemplateContext options, enabling safe script execution in untrusted environments as highlighted in the features.
Cons
The Liquid compatibility mode has documented restrictions and may not fully support all Liquid syntax variants, potentially causing issues for complex templates as admitted in the README.
Embedding Scriban source files requires specific project configurations and carries warnings about file modifications, adding setup overhead and risk of unintended changes.
By default, .NET members are renamed to lowercase with underscores, which can be confusing and requires additional configuration via MemberRenamer to change, as noted in the README warning.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Projects
FluidFluid is an open-source .NET template engine based on the Liquid template language.
RazorLightTemplate engine based on Microsoft's Razor parsing engine for .NET Core
Handlebars.NetA real .NET Handlebars engine
SmartFormatA lightweight text templating library written in C# which can be a drop-in replacement for string.Format
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