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? 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.
Download duster.js to your project root folder and install dependencies:
npm install dustjs-linkedin
npm install watch
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
You can modify folder paths in the duster.js file
./src/dusts/tweet.dust
./src/dusts/user.dust
Compiles 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 use Jammit to concatenate all the JS files before production deployment.
by Dan McGrady http://dmix.ca