What is Jade?

Jade, the templating language has a very intuitive syntax. You will most likely understand 70 percent of how Jade works just by looking at an example. In fact, the best way to start learning Jade is to look at a moderately complex Jade example and try to make sense of it.

Note

In this chapter, we will be focusing only on the language aspect of Jade. For other details about Jade, visit the official Jade website at http://jade-lang.com/.

Jade support is not enabled in Express apps by default. Jade is one of the many template engines supported by Express. We will need to configure our app to support Jade by setting two app variables: one for setting the view engine to jade, and the other to set the views directory, where the view files for the app will be located:

app.set('view engine', 'jade');
app.set('views','./views');

Let's set up a quick app to see an example of Jade code in action.

The following is the content for app.js. Note that we have specified that a view named index should...