Passing binding or arguments to ERB from the command line

I have been playing around with erb from the command line recently. I wanted to make a dirt simple erb template, for example the following:

<%- name = "Joe"; quality = "fantastic" -%>
Hello. My name is <%= name %>. I hope your day is <%= quality %>.

This works if I run

erb -T - thatfile.erb

what I want to do is to make <code>name</code> and <code>quality</code> be passable from command line arguments, so that I could do something like:

./thatfile.erb "Bill" "super"

from the bash prompt and do the same thing.

I am aware that I could write a ruby script that would just read that template in and then use <code>ERB.new(File.read("thatfile.erb")).result(binding)</code>, or writing the template after an <code>__END__</code> and doing likewise, but I'm looking for a more lightweight approach if it exists, because I don't want to write two files for each erb script that I create for this purpose.

I went with the BASH command-line shortcut for environmental variables.

Outside:

STUFF=foo,bar erb input.html.erb >output.html

Inside:

<%
stuff = ENV['STUFF'].split(',')
%>

After a few minutes e-searching I determined the other solutions are all variations on "write the erb wrapper command yourself." Could be wrong, but I ain't going back.

Please note that Ruby 2.2 and newer provide a much nicer solution that was implemented according to [this][1]:

erb var1=val1 var2=val2 my-template.erb


[1]:

[To see links please register here]

Alternatively, you can use a ruby script and load it in as a library.

<!-- language: lang-rb -->

# vars.rb
@hello = 'kirk'

<!-- language: lang-erb -->

# template.html.erb
<div><%= @hello %></div>

<!-- language: lang-sh -->

$ erb -r './vars' template.html.erb

If you are using unix, try following:

$ cat 1.erb
Hello. My name is <%= name %>. I hope your day is <%= quality %>.
$ (echo '<% name="Joe"; quality="fantastic" %>' && cat 1.erb) | erb

Hello. My name is Joe. I hope your day is fantastic.