til/rails/format-specific-html-erb-template-files.md

Format Specific html.erb Template Files

There are a few tools out there that can do formatting of *.html.erb template files. One that I like is nebulab/erb-formatter because it is ready to use in many different editors. That means that it is easier to adopt on a team of developers with different editor preferences.

That said, there are projects where I don't necessarily want it wired up to run on save because the formatting changesets will be too agressive. Instead, I want to run it manually on specific files as I see fit.

To do this, I install the formatter tool:

$ gem install erb-formatter

And now it is available as a CLI tool (try which erb-format).

As their docs recommend, I can run it against all files like so:

$ erb-format app/views/**/*.html.erb --write

If that is too aggressive though, I find it useful to either run against a specific file:

$ erb-format app/views/some/model/index.html.erb --write

Or when I'm wrapping up changes on a branch, I like to run it against all the view files that were touched on this branch:

$ git diff --name-only master...HEAD -- app/views | xargs erb-format --write