Question

I am using handlebars.js to render client-side templates (using Jade on the node.js server-side) for our single-page app.

I want to precompile the handlebars templates on the server side and bundle them up as one JS file to send to the client.

Currently, I use handlebars to compile templates like so:

$ handlebars template1.handlebars template2.handlebars -f precompiled_templates.js

I’d like to write a bash script that can read all the *.handlebars files in a directory and then run them through the handlebars compiler. So, if I had a directory like so:

templates/
  temp1.handlebars
  temp2.handlebars
  temp3.handlebars
  temp4.handlebars

Running my bash script (or, one line command) in the templates directory would essentially run the following handlebars command:

$ handlebars temp1.handlebars temp2.handlebars temp3.handlebars temp4.handlebars -f precompiled_templates.js

Does anyone know how I could write a bash script to get all the handlebars files in a directory onto the command line like above?

Answer 1

It looks like you want something similar to

handlebars templates/*.handlebars -f precompiled_templates.js

except you would end up with ‘templates’ prefixed to each file. My preferred approach requires two lines:

files=( templates/*.handlebars )
handlebars "${files[@]#templates/}" -f precompiled_templates.js.

The first line puts all the desired files in an array. In the second line, we expand the contents of the array, but stripping the “templates/” prefix from each element in the resulting expansion.