// Tutorial //
Embedded Ruby
While we believe that this content benefits our community, we have not yet thoroughly reviewed it. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let us know by clicking the “report an issue“ button at the bottom of the tutorial.
The most popular way to add Ruby code inside Rails views is with embedded Ruby (ERB). Files with embedded Ruby have the extension .html.erb and these files can have any amount of regular html markup.
Here’s the basic syntax:
<ul>
<% @todo_items.each do |todo| %>
<li><%= todo.name %> : <%= todo.priority %></li>
<% end %>
</ul>
This will output html that looks like that:
<ul>
<li>Buy milk : Normal</li>
<li>Mow land : Urgent</li>
<li>Throw a ball : Normal</li>
<li>Learn Ruby : Extremely Urgent</li>
</ul>
Notice the use of <% with %> or <%= with %>. These tags are used to wrap Ruby code. The code following <% will be executed, but no output will be rendered. The code following <%= will have its result outputted in the html file.
Here’s a comment in ERB. These won’t be outputted in the html at all, not even as an html comment:
<%# Wild Things %>
Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!
Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in our Questions & Answers section, find tutorials and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business, and subscribe to topics of interest.
Sign up
author
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
