View rendering in Vapor app

In Chapter 3, Getting Started with Vapor, we created a web application using Vapor that simply printed Hello World. We also got a little flavor of dynamic HTML generation using Leaf where we passed a name in the URL route that got rendered in the HTML. In that example application, we got everything out of box configured and working. In our current ShoppingListServer Vapor application, we do not have a view renderer and instead render data in the JSON format only. To add HTML rendering, we will need to add a template rendering engine. Currently, there is one rendering engine that is officially supported by Vapor team, and that is Leaf.

What is Leaf?

Leaf is a pure Swift templating engine that lets you generate text output, given a template file and a bunch of variables. Leaf can be used by other server-side Swift frameworks and is not specific to HTML rendering. It can be used to generate code or any textual configuration file. In Vapor, it is used to render HTML...