Concept¶

Jinja is a widely used template engine in the Python ecosystem. jiren was created to make Jinja templates convenient to use directly from the command line, without writing a Python script for a small rendering task.

Template-aware command line¶

jiren detects the variables used by a template and presents them in its help output. This lets you inspect the inputs a template expects before rendering it. The same variable names become command-line options after --, keeping the invocation close to the template itself.

Make input mistakes visible¶

Templates are often rendered from data files maintained by scripts or configuration. jiren includes validation options to make mistakes easier to find:

• --required reports variables that the template needs but that were not supplied.
• --strict reports entries in a data file that the template does not use.

These checks help prevent silent output changes caused by missing values or misspelled and obsolete data keys. See the reference for details and examples.