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Liquid

A safe template language for letting users customize pages without running their code on your server.

GitHub Download v5.13.0
Stars
11.9k
Forks
1.5k
Licence
MIT
Language
Ruby
Last update
10 days ago
Type
Library

What it is

Liquid is a template engine, a tool that fills in placeholders in text or HTML with real data, such as a product name or price. It is designed so that the people writing templates can be non-programmers or untrusted users, because templates cannot run arbitrary code on the server. It is written in Ruby and installed as a gem.

  • Render a product list from data with a loop and filters, as in the README example
  • Let users edit page layouts in a theme editor while keeping the server secure
  • Use separate environments to register custom tags for email templates versus web pages
  • Turn on strict error modes to catch invalid template syntax while editing

Great for

  • Ruby developers who want to let customers or editors change the appearance of their app
  • Teams that render templates stored in a database
  • Projects that need one template format for both HTML pages and emails

Not ideal for

  • Developers who need a full general-purpose scripting language inside templates, since Liquid is intentionally limited
  • Projects not using Ruby, because the README only documents a Ruby gem
Step-by-step guide: how to use LiquidInstall, first run, examples, tips and FAQs

How to get it

  1. 1

    Install with a package manager

    You'll need: Ruby

    Add to Gemfile

    gem 'liquid'
  2. 2

    Run it

    • Add gem 'liquid' to your Gemfile and install dependencies
    • Parse a template with Liquid::Template.parse
    • Call render with a hash of variables to get the output
  3. 3

    Get the most out of it

    • Use Liquid::Environment.build to isolate custom tags and filters per context
    • Enable :strict or :warn error mode on new apps to catch invalid templates early
    • Pass strict_variables: true and strict_filters: true to find missing data during rendering
    • Use render! to raise on the first error instead of collecting them

Downloads

Source code (.zip)main branch · straight from GitHubRelease v5.13.0Release notes and sourceOfficial website & docsshopify.github.io/liquid/

Strengths

  • Designed to be safe for user-edited templates, with no arbitrary code execution
  • Parsing can be done once and rendering reused with different data
  • Configurable error modes and strict variable and filter checks help debugging

Trade-offs

  • Default lax parsing accepts almost anything, so errors can go unnoticed unless strict modes are enabled
  • Resource limits only cover certain loops, and the README notes output-free loops need more care

Stats synced from GitHub. The assessment above was drafted with AI from the project's README on 2026-10-29 and may miss recent changes — check the README before relying on a command. MIT licence: free to use, modify and distribute, including commercially, as long as you keep the copyright notice.