Is it possible to have nested templates in Go using the standard library?

Yes it is possible. A html.Template is actually a set of template files. If you execute a defined block in this set, it has access to all the other blocks defined in this set.

If you create a map of such template sets on your own, you have basically the same flexibility that Jinja / Django offers. The only difference is that the html/template package has no direct access to the file system, so you have to parse and compose the templates on your own.

Consider the following example with two different pages ("index.html" and "other.html") that both inherit from "base.html":

// Content of base.html:
{{define "base"}}<html>
  <head>{{template "head" .}}</head>
  <body>{{template "body" .}}</body>
</html>{{end}}

// Content of index.html:
{{define "head"}}<title>index</title>{{end}}
{{define "body"}}index{{end}}

// Content of other.html:
{{define "head"}}<title>other</title>{{end}}
{{define "body"}}other{{end}}

And the following map of template sets:

tmpl := make(map[string]*template.Template)
tmpl["index.html"] = template.Must(template.ParseFiles("index.html", "base.html"))
tmpl["other.html"] = template.Must(template.ParseFiles("other.html", "base.html"))

You can now render your "index.html" page by calling 

tmpl["index.html"].Execute("base", data)

and you can render your "other.html" page by calling

tmpl["other.html"].Execute("base", data)

With some tricks (e.g. a consistent naming convention of your template files), it's even possible to generate the tmpl map automatically.


note, when you execute your base template, you must pass values down to the child templates, here I simply pass ".", so that everything is passed down.

template one displays {{.}}

{{define "base"}}
<html>
        <div class="container">
            {{.}}
            {{template "content" .}}
        </div>
    </body>
</html>
{{end}}

template two displays {{.domains}} that's passed into the parent.

{{define "content"}}
{{.domains}}
{{end}}

Note, if we used {{template "content"}} instead of {{template "content" .}}, .domains wouldn't be accessible from the content template.

DomainsData := make(map[string]interface{})
    DomainsData["domains"] = domains.Domains
    if err := groupsTemplate.ExecuteTemplate(w, "base", DomainsData); err != nil {
        http.Error(w, err.Error(), http.StatusInternalServerError)
    }

having worked with other template packages, now a days I mostly work with standard html/template package, I guess I was naive to not appreciate the simplicity it provides and other goodies. I use a very similar approach to accepted answer with following changes

you don't need to wrap your layouts with additional base template, a template block is created for every parsed file so in this case it is redundant, I also like to use the block action provided in new version of go, which allows you to have default block content in case you don't provide one in child templates

// base.html
<head>{{block "head" .}} Default Title {{end}}</head>
<body>{{block "body" .}} default body {{end}}</body>

and you page templates can be the same as

// Content of index.html:
{{define "head"}}<title>index</title>{{end}}
{{define "body"}}index{{end}}

// Content of other.html:
{{define "head"}}<title>other</title>{{end}}
{{define "body"}}other{{end}}

now to execute the templates you need to call it like so 

tmpl["index.html"].ExecuteTemplate(os.Stdout, "base.html", data)

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