Loading pre-compiled Handlebar templates in Node JS server side

Question

Is there a protocol for loading pre-compiled templates using handlebars.js NPM module or one has to supply their own “getTemplate” function to load a specific template ?

Following fails with a cannot read property 'hello' of undefined.

var compiledTemplate =  handlebars.templates['hello'];

“hello.handlebars“ is name of the template file.

whereas this one works fine.

var template = fs.readFileSync(“./hello.html", "utf8");
var uncompiledTemplate = handlebars.compile(template); 
var data = {message : "Hello world!"};
var finalPageHTML = uncompiledTemplate(data);

So what do I need so I can just execute

compiledTemplate(data) 

and get my final HTML simmilar to the uncompiled version ?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I found a solution that works for me. I have a template in my templates directory, called list.handlebars:

<ul>
    <li>{{title}}</li>
</ul>

Then, I run this command:

handlebars -c handlebars templates -f dist/templates.js && echo module.exports = templates; >> dist/templates.js

The '-c handlebars' flag prepends require("handlebars"); to the output.

Then, in my server code, i use:

var template = require('./dist/templates');
console.log(template['list']({title: 'winner'}));