Introducing Jinja

Jinja is a templating engine that was developed in 2008 by Armin Ronacher in an effort to provide Python developers with a framework that would supply comprehensive Python-like syntax that could be used within strings and data documents. The solution was designed with similar solutions such as Smarty and Django in mind. Jinja executes its template translations in a sandbox (isolated from the rest of the program execution) so as to prevent the template engine from interfering with the normal operational execution of the Python program.

Jinja2 represents the second major version of the Jinja Python library. Jinja is leveraged to generate string-based documents based on one or more predefined templates (also made of strings). As of the writing of this book, Jinja is in use by numerous open source solutions that are actively developed with Python. Some notable examples of solutions that use Jinja include Salt, Flask, and Ansible.

When coupled with Ansible and YAML, Jinja adds...