Standalone Mode

Runnig Stencil as a standalone application make it possible to process templates from batch scripts. It may also be easier if your application's architecture is not written in java.

Building

Build the project with the make uberjar command to get a standalone application. The built output will be found in the target directory.

Run the file with the java -jar *-standalone.jar command.

Running

The syntax for runnig the application is the following.

java -jar *-standalone.jar [args and flags] [--] [filenames ...]

The return status code is 0 iff no error happened when rendering the files.

The arguments and flags are the following:

• -h or --help displays a help screen.
• -o DIR or --output=DIR is the output directory of the rendered documents. It defaults to the current working directory. This directory must exist when running Stencil.
• -O or --overwrite flag states that the rendered documents should be overwritten when the target file already exists instead of exiting with and error. Defaults to false.
• -j JOBSFILE or --jobs=JOBSFILE specifies a file that contains a newline-separated repeating sequence of a template file path and data file paths.
• -s or --stdin specifies that the sequence of template files and data files should come from the standard input.
• -i or --only-includes specifies that only fragment inclusion directives should be evaluated in the template files.

The filenames part is a repeating sequence of a template file and data files. For example: template1.docx t1data1.json t1data2.json template2.json t2data2.json ... Each template file will be rendered with the data files after it. So the output will be three rendered documents with the names template1-t1data1.docx, template1-t1data2.docx and template2-t2data2.json.

When using the -j parameter the jobs file should look like the following:

templatefile1.docx
datafile1.json
datafile2.json
templatefile2.docx
datafile3.json
datafile4.json
...etc...

On --stdin parameter the jobs on the standard input should come in the same format as seen in the case of -j.

Example calls

The following renders template template1.docx with three data files. It will put the three resulting documents to /data/rendered and it will overwrite existing files if any:

java -jar stencil-*-standalone.jar -o /data/rendered --overwrite -- template1.docx data1.docx data2.docx data3.docx