phreax / node-handlebars-precompiler

Share your Handlebars templates between Node and the browser with minimal effort.

Death to Redundant View Templates!

Get the package: npm install handlebars-precompiler

This is how you might use it in an Express project:

app.configure('development', function(){
  hbsPrecompiler = require('handlebars-precompiler');
  hbsPrecompiler.watchDir(
    __dirname + "/views",
    __dirname + "/public/javascripts/templates.js",
    ['handlebars', 'hbs']
  );
});

In this example, we watch for changes to *.handlebars and *.hbs files in our views directory. When changes are made, precompilation is run on all Handlebars templates and exported to a single minified Javascript file.

On the browser side, you will need to deploy the Handlebars runtime-only release. You could use the full release which includes a compiler, but your site will be faster if you don't.

Client-side versions of the templates will be named and stored in the Handlebars object according to their file paths, e.g. Handlebars.templates['users/show']