rollup-plugin-ractive-templates

A Rollup plugin to import and compile Ractive templates.

Installation

npm i rollup-plugin-ractive-compiler --save-dev

Usage

let rollup = require( 'rollup' );
let ractiveCompiler = require( 'rollup-plugin-ractive-compiler' );

rollup({
    entry: 'app.js',

    plugins: [

        ractiveCompiler({

            // compile is true by default
            compile: true,

            // default extensions are .html and .htm
            extensions: [ '.html', '.htm' ],

            // include is required to be specified, can be a minimatch pattern or an array of 
            // minimatch patterns, relative to process.cwd()
            include: '**/*.html'

            // Exclude is optional. Can be a minimatch pattern or an array of minimatch patterns, 
            // relative to process.cwd()
            exclude: '**/*.text.html'
        })
    ]
});

In the example above, we use the include property to indicate which files are handled as Ractive templates. We can specify the exclude property to exclude paths from being processed by this plugin.

The extensions property controls which file extensions are allowed, by default '.html' and '.htm'.

With our plugin in place we can import and compile our Ractive templates.

Given the Ractive template, template.html:

<div>Hello {{name}}</div>

we can import it as follows:

import viewTemplate from './template.html';
import Ractive from 'Ractive.js';

let view = new Ractive({
    el: '#main',
    template: viewTemplate,
    data: { name: 'World' }
});

Why do we need this plugin?

The ES6 modules (as far as I now) does not allow importing text files as modules. So if we want to import plain html or json we are out of luck.

For example, when using a Model/View/Controller pattern we can import the Controller and Model because they themselves can be Javascript modules:

import controller from './controller.js';
import model from './model.js';
let view = '<div>Hello world</div>';

let mvc = createMVC(model, view, controller);

Ideally we want to import the View (HTML Template) as well:

import view from "./view.html";

But ES6 Modules doesn't allow us (at least yet) to import text.

A second issue we face is when a Ractive instance is created the template is compiled into a format that Ractive can understand. Compiling the template has some overhead so in production environments we want to precompile our templates. so that Ractive doesn't have to do it at runtime.

Goal

We want to import our html templates just as easily as Javascript modules.

Given our view view.html:

<div>Hello {{name}}</div>

we want to do this:

import controller from "./controller.js";
import model from "./model.js";
import view from "./view.js";

let mvc = createMVC(model, view, controller);

Now our HTML View can be managed in it's own separate .html file with syntax highlighting provided by an editor.

We also want an option to precompile our templates for production use.

Solution

This Rollup plugin allows us to both import and compile Ractive templates.

By default this plugin will compile the Ractive templates, but it is possible to disable compiling during development.

The following options are supported:

ractiveCompiler({
    
    // compile is true by default
    compile: true,
     
    // default extensions are .html and .htm
    extensions: [ '.html', '.htm' ],

    // include is required to be specified, can be a minimatch pattern or an array of minimatch patterns, relative to process.cwd()
    include: '**/*.html'
    // or
    include: ['**/templates/*.html', '**/views/*.html']

    // Exclude is optional. Can be a minimatch pattern or an array of minimatch patterns, relative to process.cwd()
    exclude: '**/*.text.html'
    // or
    exclude: ['**/*.text.html', '**/*.plain.html']
})

The include and exclude properties allow minimatch patterns or array of minimatch patterns to finely control which templates should be processed by this plugin.

The extensions property specifies an array of file extensions to further control which files are processed.

What if we want to import text/html files that aren't Ractive templates?

import someText from 'templates/some.text.html';
import someData from 'templates/data.json';

In this case we can use another Rollup plugin: https://github.com/TrySound/rollup-plugin-string.

Example

Here is an example showing how to import and compile ractive templates as well as iporting non-ractive html/text or json files.

var rollup = require( 'rollup' );
var ractiveCompiler = require( 'rollup-plugin-ractive-compiler' );
var stringToModule = require( 'rollup-plugin-string' );

rollup({

    entry: 'app.js',
	
    plugins: [
  
        // Setup ractive compiler plugin
        ractiveCompiler({
    
            // compile is true by default
            compile: false,

            // Include all html files
            include: '**/*.html'

            // Exclude html files containing '.text.' in their names.
            exclude: '**/*.text.html'
        }),

        // Setup 'string' plugin
        stringToModule({
            // Include html files containing '.text.' in their names as well as .json files
            include: [ '**/*.text.html', '**/*.json' ]
        })
    ]
});

In the example above, we use the ractiveCompiler' include property to indicate which files are handled as Ractive templates.

include: **/*.html says include all html files in all folders to be loaded and compiled into Ractive templates. include can also accept an array of values:

['**/templates/*.html', '**/views/*.html']

this says include all html files in the templates and views folders.

We can also specify the exclude property to exclude certain files:

exclude: **/*.text.html says all files with the string .text. in them, will be excluded eg. some.text.html won't be compiled by this plugin.

Next we configure the rollup-plugin-string to include files containing the string .text. in their names as well as .json files.

With this setup in place we can import both ractive and non-ractive templates and data files.

import ractiveTemplate from './ractiveTemplate.html';
import plainText from './plain.text.html';
import someJson from './some.json';

To differentiate between ractive and on-ractive templates we can also use a naming convention based on file extensions.

We can specify Ractive templates as having the extension .htm and non-ractive templates with extension .html. Most editors handle both .htm and .html extensions as HTML so syntax highlighting will be applied to both files.

For example:

var rollup = require( 'rollup' );
var ractiveCompiler = require( 'rollup-plugin-ractive-compiler' );
var stringToModule = require( 'rollup-plugin-string' );

rollup({

    entry: 'app.js',
    
    plugins: [
  
        ractiveCompiler({
            // we specify .htm extension for racitive templates
            include: '**/*.htm',
			
            // default extensions are .html and .htm, so we don't need to specify anything here
            // extensions: [ '.html', '.htm' ]
        }),
    
        stringToModule({
            // we specify .html extension as html files (non ractive templates)
            include: '**/*.html'
        })
    ]
});

If we want to use an alternative extension for our ractive templates ie. '.ract' we must adjust the plugin' extensions property:

ractiveCompiler({
    include: '**/*.ract',
		
    // default extensions are .html and .htm
    // here we specify a different set of extensions
    extensions: [ '.html', '.ract' ]
});