Rendering templates

A lit-html template expression does not cause any DOM to be created or updated. It's only a description of DOM, called a TemplateResult. To actually create or update DOM, you need to pass the TemplateResult to the render() function, along with a container to render to:

import {html, render} from 'lit-html';

const sayHi = (name) => html`<h1>Hello ${name}</h1>`;
render(sayHi('Amy'), document.body);

// subsequent renders will update the DOM
render(sayHi('Zoe'), document.body);

Render Options

The render method also takes an options argument that allows you to specify the following options:

eventContext: The this value to use when invoking event listeners registered with the @eventName syntax. This option only applies when you specify an event listener as a plain function. If you specify the event listener using an event listener object, the listener object is used as the this value. See Add event listeners for more on event listeners.
templateFactory: The TemplateFactory to use. This is an advanced option. A TemplateFactory creates a template element from a TemplateResult, typically caching templates based on their static content. Users won't usually supply their own TemplateFactory, but libraries that use lit-html may implement custom template factories to customize template handling.

The shady-render module provides its own template factory, which it uses to preprocess templates to integrate with the shadow DOM polyfills (shadyDOM and shadyCSS).

For example, if you're creating a component class, you might use render options like this:

class MyComponent extends HTMLElement {
  // ...

  _update() {
    // Bind event listeners to the current instance of MyComponent
    render(this._template(), this._renderRoot, {eventContext: this});
  }
}

Render options should not change between subsequent render calls.