express-compile

v3.0.15

Published

3 years ago

Supporting package to compile JS and CSS in Express applications

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express-compile

express-compile is middleware that compiles JS and CSS on the fly within your express application. This project is based off electron-compile project and uses the same compilers.

For JavaScript:

JavaScript ES6/ES7 (via Babel)
TypeScript
CoffeeScript

For CSS:

LESS
Sass/SCSS

For HTML:

Jade

For JSON:

CSON

How does it work? (Slightly Harder Way)

Put this at the top of your Express app:

import {Compiler} from 'express-compile';

app.use(Compiler({
    root: '.',
    cwd: 'public',
    paths: ['public/**/*'],
    ignore: ['public/node_modules/**/*'],
    ignoreStyleCache: true
}));
app.use(express.static('/public'));

I did it, now what?

From then on, you can now simply include files directly in your HTML, no need for cross-compilation:

<head>
  <script src="main.coffee"></script>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="main.less" />
</head>

or just require them in:

require('./mylib')   // mylib.ts

Something isn't working / I'm getting weird errors

express-compile uses the debug module, set the DEBUG environment variable to debug what express-compile is doing:

## Debug just express-compile
DEBUG=express-compile:* npm start

## Grab everything except for Babel which is very noisy
DEBUG=*,-babel npm start

How do I set up (Babel / LESS / whatever) the way I want?

If you've got a .babelrc and that's all you want to customize, you can simply use it directly. express-compile will respect it, even the environment-specific settings. If you want to customize other compilers, use a .compilerc file. Here's an example:

{
  "application/javascript": {
    "presets": ["stage-0", "es2015", "react"],
    "sourceMaps": "inline"
  },
  "text/less": {
    "dumpLineNumbers": "comments"
  }
}

.compilerc also accepts environments with the same syntax as .babelrc:

{
  "env": {
    "development": {
      "application/javascript": {
        "presets": ["stage-0", "es2015", "react"],
        "sourceMaps": "inline"
      },
      "text/less": {
        "dumpLineNumbers": "comments"
      }
    },
    "production": {
      "application/javascript": {
        "presets": ["stage-0", "es2015", "react"],
        "sourceMaps": "none"
      }
    }
  }
}

The opening Object is a list of MIME Types, and options passed to the compiler implementation. These parameters are documented here:

Babel - http://babeljs.io/docs/usage/options
CoffeeScript - http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/coffee-script.html#section-5
TypeScript - https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/v1.5.0-beta/bin/typescriptServices.d.ts#L1076
LESS - http://lesscss.org/usage/index.html#command-line-usage-options
LESS - http://lesscss.org/usage/index.html#command-line-usage-options
Jade - http://jade-lang.com/api

How can I precompile my code for release-time?

express-compile comes with a command-line application to pre-create a cache for you.

Usage: express-compile --appDir [root-app-dir] paths...

Options:
  -a, --appdir  The top-level application directory (i.e. where your
                package.json is)
  -v, --verbose  Print verbose information
  -h, --help     Show help

Run express-compile on all of your application assets, even if they aren't strictly code (i.e. your static assets like PNGs). express-compile will recursively walk the given directories.

express-compile --appDir /path/to/my/app ./src ./static

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express-compile

How does it work? (Slightly Harder Way)

I did it, now what?

Something isn't working / I'm getting weird errors

How do I set up (Babel / LESS / whatever) the way I want?

How can I precompile my code for release-time?