Render HTML

For websites, which is not what all HTTP servers are, your primary task is often to produce HTML responses.

• Add hiccup to your deps.edn

  This is a library which takes data structures and produces HTML.

  The upside to using something like this to produce HTML is that you can have your HTML embedded directly into the code without a separate templating language.

  The downside is that your HTML won't be already in HTML form, which precludes usage of some tooling and people.

  {:paths ["src"]
   :deps {org.clojure/clojure {:mvn/version "1.12.0"}
          ring/ring {:mvn/version "1.13.0"}
          metosin/reitit-ring {:mvn/version "0.7.2"}
          org.clojure/tools.logging {:mvn/version "1.3.0"}
          org.slf4j/slf4j-simple {:mvn/version "2.0.16"}
          hiccup/hiccup {:mvn/version "2.0.0-RC3"}}
   :aliases {:nREPL
              {:extra-paths ["dev"]
               :extra-deps
                {nrepl/nrepl {:mvn/version "1.3.0"}}}
             :dev {:extra-paths ["dev"]}}}

• Render HTML in your handlers

  It's important to only use the hiccup2.core namespace. The hiccup.core one has some intrinsic problems you don't want to deal with.

  Similarly to reitit routes, the input here is a data structure. There are tools for converting HTML snippets you want to use automatically into this hiccup format. Some are documented HERE.

  (ns example.routes
    (:require [reitit.ring :as reitit-ring]
              [clojure.tools.logging :as log]
              [hiccup2.core :as hiccup]))
  
  (defn hello-handler
    [system request]
    {:status 200
     :headers {"Content-Type" "text/html"}
     :body (str
             (hiccup/html
               [:html
                [:body
                 [:h1 "Hello, world"]]]))})
  
  (defn goodbye-handler
    [system request]
    {:status 200
     :headers {"Content-Type" "text/html"}
     :body (str
             (hiccup/html
               [:html
                [:body
                 [:h1 "Goodbye, world"]]]))})
  
  (defn routes
    [system]
    [["/"        {:get {:handler (partial #'hello-handler system)}}]
     ["/goodbye" {:get {:handler (partial #'goodbye-handler system)}}]])
  
  (defn not-found-handler
    [_request]
    {:status 404
     :headers {"Content-Type" "text/html"}
     :body (str
             (hiccup/html
               [:html
                [:body
                 [:h1 "Not Found"]]]))})
  
  (defn root-handler
    [system request]
    (log/info (str (:request-method request) " - " (:uri request)))
    (let [handler (reitit-ring/ring-handler
                    (reitit-ring/router
                      (routes system))
                    #'not-found-handler)]
      (handler request)))