handlebars-precompiler

Death to Redundant View Templates!

I'll release this to NPM soon, but in the meantime you can just download the file and use it. I keep mine in my_app/lib.

This is how to use it in your Express project:

app.configure('development', function(){
  hbsPrecompiler = require('./lib/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 you'd just be wasting resources.

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