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Leaf is a powerful templating language with Swift-inspired syntax. You can use it to generate dynamic HTML pages for a front-end website or generate rich emails to send from an API.


The first step to using Leaf is adding it as a dependency to your project in your SPM package manifest file.

// swift-tools-version:4.0
import PackageDescription

let package = Package(
    name: "MyApp",
    dependencies: [
        /// Any other dependencies ...
    targets: [
        .target(name: "App", dependencies: ["Leaf", ...]),


Once you have added the package to your project, you can configure Vapor to use it. This is usually done in configure.swift.

import Leaf

try services.register(LeafProvider())

If your application supports multiple view renderers, you may need to specify that you would like to use Leaf.

config.prefer(LeafRenderer.self, for: ViewRenderer.self)

Folder Structure

Once you have configured Leaf, you will need to ensure you have a Views folder to store your .leaf files in. By default, Leaf expects the views folder to be a ./Resources/Views relative to your project's root.

You will also likely want to enable Vapor's FileMiddleware to serve files from your /Public folder.

├── Package.swift
├── Resources
│   ├── Views
│   │   └── hello.leaf
├── Public
│   ├── images (images resources)
│   ├── styles (css resources)
└── Sources
    └── ...

Syntax Highlighting

You may also wish to install one of these third-party packages that provide support for syntax highlighting in Leaf templates.


Install the package Leaf from package control.


language-leaf by ButkiewiczP


It is currently not possible to implement Leaf Syntax Highlighting in Xcode, however, using Xcode's HTML Syntax Coloring can help a bit. Select one or more Leaf files and then choose Editor > Syntax Coloring > HTML. Your selected Leaf files will now use Xcode's HTML Syntax Coloring. Unfortunately the usefulness of this is limited because this association will be removed when vapor xcode is run.

There appears to be a way to make Xcode file associations persist but that requires a bit more kung-fu.

Also, there is a unsupported solution that associates .leaf-files in Xcode with HTML syntax coloring automatically: xcode-leaf-color-schemer by ashokgelal.

VS Code

html-leaf by FranciscoAmado

CLion & AppCode

Some preliminary work has been done to implement a Leaf Plugin for CLion & AppCode but lack of skill and interest in Java has slowed progress! If you have IntelliJ SDK experience and want to help with this, message Tom Holland on Vapor Slack

Rendering a View

Now that Leaf is configured, let's render your first template. Inside of the Resources/Views folder, create a new file called hello.leaf with the following contents:

Hello, #(name)!

Then, register a route (usually done in routes.swift or a controller) to render the view.

import Leaf

router.get("hello") { req -> Future<View> in
    return try req.view().render("hello", ["name": "Leaf"])

Open your browser and visit /hello. You should see Hello, Leaf!. Congratulations on rendering your first Leaf view!