How to include html files with express and ejs

Question

Code

I want to make my webpage modular so that I don´t need to write my stuff again and again. I thought my solution would be the ejs lib. So I´ve using express and ejs that is configured like this:

const app = express();
app.engine('.html', require('ejs').renderFile);
app.set('view engine', 'html');
app.set('views', __dirname + '/wwwroot/views');

My views folder struct looks like that:

wwwroot
  static
    css
    js
  views
    login
      index.html
    profile
      dashboard.html
    templates
      inc_header.html
      inc_footer.html

My Dashboard has the following content

<% include templates/inc_header.html %>

This is my dashboard

Problem

The Header file will not be included. I´ve tried wwwroot/views/templates/header.html and header.html. Nothing works.

My Whole Serverconfiguration

app.engine('.html', require('ejs').renderFile);
app.set('view engine', 'html');
app.set('views', __dirname + '/wwwroot/views');

app.use(session({
    secret: program.secret || "secret",
    resave: true,
    saveUninitialized: true
}));
app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: false }))
app.use('/', express.static(path.join(__dirname, '/wwwroot/static/')));

Output on the Webserver

<% include templates/inc_header.html %> This is my dashboard

Looks like the file will not be rendered?

Answer 1

This is from ejs docs :

Includes are relative to the template with the include call.

Since the file from where you include headers is dashboard.html then the path should be:

<% include ../templates/inc_header %>

Answer 2

<% - include templates/inc_header.html %>

include template tags of ejs has a hyphen attached to the opening tag

add the hyphen to the include tag and it will work.

you can also send data to the file being included

     <%- include("../partials/head.ejs", {variant:e.name}); %>

but NB: if a variable is to be used in it, it has to be passed to it from anywhere it is being included.

to solve this issue you can set a default value to it if not sent Add this to the file being included

    <em>Variant: <%= typeof variant != 'undefined' ? variant : 'default' %></em>

for more check out this link

for using html files in express using ejs, use this in the index.js(entry point for tour application)

const app = express();
app.engine('.html', require('ejs').renderFile);
app.set('view engine', 'html');