Node.js not recognizing Coffeescript

Question

I am currently trying to get into NodeJS together with the SailsJS framework. And I want to use coffeescript on the serverside aswell, but after converting all files in config/*.js to config/*.coffee properly with js2coffee, I get the following error when trying to start up the app:

config/400.coffee

SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL

pointing to the first character in the file, which is a hashtag for a coffee comment. So it seems the app does not recognize the file as coffeescript, but searching for standard js instead.

I tried installing the package coffee-script and requireing it in

app.js

require('coffee-script');
require('sails').lift(require('optimist').argv);

but it doesn't help.

If I delete 400.coffee , the error appears in the next file 403.coffee etc.

What am I doing wrong? Isn't coffeescript allowed in the config files or am I missing something?

Answer 1

Coffeescript 1.7.0, released Jan 28th, 2014, changed the require('coffee-script') behavior to only load the compiler itself. Now, do load the automatic compiler for .coffee files, you must call require('coffee-script/register') before loading any coffeescript files.

Keep in mind that using this will mean that every .coffee file will be recompiled every time you start node , which could increase startup times. That may or may not be important to you though.