Pebble

Ktor allows you to use Pebble templates as views within your application by installing the Pebble plugin.

Add dependencies

To use Pebble, add the ktor-server-pebble artifact to your build script:

implementation("io.ktor:ktor-server-pebble:$ktor_version")

implementation "io.ktor:ktor-server-pebble:$ktor_version"

        
                    <dependency>
                        <groupId>io.ktor</groupId>
                        <artifactId>ktor-server-pebble-jvm</artifactId>
                        <version>${ktor_version}</version>
                    </dependency>
                    
        

Install Pebble

To install the Pebble plugin to your application, pass it to the install function in the specified module. The following examples show how to install Pebble:

In an embeddedServer() function call.
In an explicitly defined module() extension function on the Application class.

                    import io.ktor.server.engine.*
                    import io.ktor.server.netty.*
                    import io.ktor.server.application.*
                    import io.ktor.server.pebble.*

                    fun main() {
                        embeddedServer(Netty, port = 8080) {
                            install(Pebble)
                            // ...
                        }.start(wait = true)
                    }
                

                    import io.ktor.server.application.*
                    import io.ktor.server.pebble.*
                    // ...
                    fun Application.module() {
                        install(Pebble)
                        // ...
                    }
                

Inside the install block, you can configure the PebbleEngine.Builder for loading Pebble templates.

Configure Pebble

Configure template loading

To load templates, you need to configure how to load templates using PebbleEngine.Builder. For example, the code snippet below enables Ktor to look up templates in the templates package relative to the current classpath:

import io.ktor.server.application.*
import io.ktor.server.pebble.*
import io.ktor.server.response.*

fun Application.module() {
    install(Pebble) {
        loader(ClasspathLoader().apply {
            prefix = "templates"
        })
    }
}

Send a template in response

Imagine you have the index.html template in resources/templates:

<html>
    <body>
        <h1>Hello, {{user.name}}</h1>
    </body>
</html>

A data model for a user looks as follows:

data class User(val id: Int, val name: String)

To use the template for the specified route, pass PebbleContent to the call.respond method in the following way:

        get("/index") {
            val sampleUser = User(1, "John")
            call.respond(PebbleContent("index.html", mapOf("user" to sampleUser)))
        }

20 October 2025