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