Middleware component to use Hogan.js mustache templates as views in an Express server
var app = express();
app.configure(function () {
app.set('views', __dirname + '/views'); // tell express which directory your views are in
app.set('view engine', 'mustache'); // name your templates
app.engine('mustache', require('hogan-middleware').__express); // register the engine
});
Once registered, your routing in express can use a mustache file name as the view to be rendered:
app.get('/', req, res, next) {
res.render('home', { SiteName: 'My Website' });
}
In this case there is a file named home.mustache in the views directory that may have content as:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head><title>Hello World</title></head>
<body>
<h1>{{SiteName}}</h1>
</body>
</html>
Mustache allows the use of partial templates, this is supported by the middleware component by making all templates available as partial templates when rendering a template.
When home.mustache is being used as the name of the template to be rendered, that can include a.mustache from the
views directory by adding {{>a}}. As a.mustache is rendered as a partial, that also has all templates available
to it for use as partials, so could in turn have {{>b}} to include a nested partial.
To allow for a tidy source tree, templates can be in any number of sub-directories under the main views directory, they are all made available for use as partials without any path identifier.
Note - multiple templates with the same name but in different directories will overwrite each other.
Note - don't include the same template as a partial inside itself.
As express uses the the render engine for the first time, a series of watches are added to any sub-directory of the views directory so that any changes are automatically reloaded for you while the server is still running.