Duster.js - Watch & precompile dust.js templates

A simple Node script duster.js to watch a directory of .dust templates and compile them into .js files which can be included into an HTML file.

Why duster.js? Autocompile your templates to use dust.js in the browser

The dust.js documentation does not mentioned a clear way to work with dust templates in a purely client-side approach, instead focusing on server-side node.js applications.

For my backbone.js app, the only option was to include the dust-full.js file and compile the templates on each browser load. The file is much larger than the normal dust-core.js and this approach provides no extra value over other templating solutions (performance, browser caching, external file management etc).

So I wrote a script to pre-compile dust.js files whenever they are modified in a folder.

Install

Download duster.js to your project root folder and install dependencies:

Usage

Create dust.js templates in ./src/dusts/ with the file extension .dust and create ./public/dusts directory where files will be compiled to, then run watcher script:

$ node duster.js
$ npm start (alternative)

You can modify folder paths in the duster.json configuration file

raw_dir - directory to watch for .dust files
pre_dir - directory to place output .js files int

Example:

Configuration:

{ "raw_dir": "./src/dusts", "pre_dir": "./public/dusts" }

Then these files:

./src/dusts/tweet.dust
./src/dusts/user.dust

Compile to:

./public/dusts/tweet.js
./public/dusts/user.js

Then you include them in the html:

<script src="dust-core-1.0.0.min.js"></script>
<script src="tweet.js"></script>
<script src="user.js"></script>

I then concatenate all the JS files before production deployment (using something like Jammit).

More information

@ericktai wrote an example app/tutorial on how to use dust.js client-side using duster.js: https://github.com/ericktai/dust-js-browser

Linkedin also wrote a dust.js tutorial: https://github.com/linkedin/dustjs/wiki/Dust-Tutorial

by Dan McGrady http://dmix.ca