Exbars

Exbars is a flexible Handlebars view engine for Express, designed to give developers complete freedom to choose how they want to organize their templates, partials, and helpers.

Installation

$ npm install --save exbars

Usage

var express = require('express');
var exbars = require('exbars');

var app = express();

app.engine('hbs', exbars({defaultLayout: 'main'}));
app.set('view engine', 'hbs');

app.get('/', function(req, res) {
  res.render('index', {title: 'Welcome!'});
});

app.listen(3000);

Your views/ directory will contain four types of files: Layouts, Templates, Partials, and Helpers.

If your views/ directory is somewhere other than the root of your application folder, you need to specify it like this:

app.engine('hbs', exbars({defaultLayout: 'main', viewsPath: 'app/views'}));

app.set('views', 'app/views');
app.set('view engine', 'hbs');

Layouts

Layouts live inside the views/layouts/ directory, they are just a special kind of templates with a {{{body}}} placeholder

Render a view with another layout:

app.get('/', function(req, res) {
  res.render('index', {title: 'Welcome!', layout: 'other_layout'});
});

Render a view with no layouts:

app.get('/', function(req, res) {
  res.render('index', {title: 'Welcome!', layout: false});
});

Templates

Templates are files ending with a '.hbs' extension, with no underscore at the beginning, ex: home.hbs

Partials

Each file that starts with an underscore is a partial, ex: _header.hbs, _footer_content.hbs

template.hbs:

<div>
  {{partial 'footer_content' }}
</div>

the code above will look for a partial called _footer_content.hbs in the same folder as template.hbs, if it's not found, it will look under the views/ folder instead. If you want to include a partial from another folder, let's say views/partials/_header.hbs, you need to do something like this:

<div>
  {{partial 'partials/header' }}
</div>

This code will look for the partial header inside a folder called partials located in the same directory as the view that calls the partial, if it's not found, it will look inside the views/partials/ folder.

Helpers

Helpers are files that end with '_helper.js', ex: date_helper.js

Helpers must also export themselves so they can be available for use in template:

full_name_helper.js:

module.exports = function(person) {
  return persone.firstName + ' ' + person.lastName;
};

template.hbs:

<div>
  {{fullName person}}
</div>

Notice: your helper name will always be transformed from underscore to camelcase!

Views directory structure

You can structure your files anyway you want, depending on your work style and your application logic.

.
├── app.js
└── views
    ├── contact.hbs
    ├── _footer.hbs
    ├── _header.hbs
    ├── index.hbs
    ├── layouts
    │   └── main.hbs
    ├── login.hbs
    └── title_helper.js

2 directories, 8 files

You can put your helpers and partials in their own folder if you don't want them mixed with your templates:

.
├── app.js
└── views
    ├── contact.hbs
    ├── helpers
    │   └── title_helper.js
    ├── index.hbs
    ├── layouts
    │   └── main.hbs
    ├── login.hbs
    └── partials
        ├── _footer.hbs
        └── _header.hbs

4 directories, 8 files

And you can also do something like this:

.
├── app.js
└── views
    ├── layouts
    │   └── main.hbs
    ├── posts
    │   ├── edit.hbs
    │   ├── index.hbs
    │   ├── new.hbs
    │   ├── show.hbs
    │   └── title_helper.js
    └── users
        ├── gravatar_helper.js
        ├── login.hbs
        ├── profile.hbs
        └── _social_links.hbs

4 directories, 11 files

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Youssef Kababe hello@youssefkababe.com

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.