hogan-middleware
Middleware component to use Hogan.js mustache templates as views in an Express server
Usage
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>
Configuration
Optional functionality in the middleware can be set before passing it into express:
var hoganMiddleware = require('hogan-middleware');
hoganMiddleware({
filter: ['**.mustache'], // override the default file extension searched for
// default is just the mustache file extension
flatten: true, // make all partials available with just their file name
// rather than the slash delimited path. default is enabled
watch: true // set to false to remove the live updating watchers -
// can be useful for running in production where files
// will not be regularly changing.
});
app.engine('mustache', hoganMiddleware.__express);
Partial Templates
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. Set the
flatten configuration option to false to always use the relative path as the name of the partials
(ie: {{>app/header}} instead of just {{>header}}). Whether the flatten option is enabled or not, the relative
path name will always be available.
Note - don't include the same template as a partial inside itself.
Live Updating
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.