coffee-cache

coffee-cache

Caches the contents of required CoffeeScript files so that they are not recompiled to help improve startup time.

What it does

In a Node.js application written in CoffeeScript, every time you start the application, all the relevant files must be compiled when they are required. If you have a very large application, this process can consume a large portion of your startup time. By caching the compiled JavaScript files, only those that have been updated must be recompiled, and the rest can be loaded off of the disk. In our usage, this has reduced the startup time from 7s to 2s, which means a lot when you have to restart your application every time you want to test a change.

How to use

1. Add to your package.json dependencies and run npm install or run npm install coffee-cache.

2. In your entry point file, add the following:

   require('coffee-cache')
   

3. That's it. By default the files are cached in the ./.coffee/ directory. If you want to change this, see below.

Extra configuration

You can specify the location of the directory to use for the cached files in one of two ways:

1. Start the process with the COFFEE_CACHE_DIR variable set:

   $ COFFEE_CACHE_DIR=/tmp/coffee-cache coffee app.coffee
   

2. Use the setCacheDir method on the required module:

   require('coffee-cache').setCacheDir('../cached/')
   

Just make sure your process has permission to create the necessary folder or files.