Where does NodeBB compile templates?

[julian]

In that case, public/templates

[drew]

@julian and it's safe to rm -rf public/templates/* ?

[julian]

Should be*. The files there get regenereated every time you restart (or reload, I'd assume) NodeBB.

* Caveat Emptor

[psychobunny]

Yup. And it isn't tjs that does this, its NodeBB. We'll be moving stuff like this into grunt eventually

[drew]

@psychobunny I prefer Gulp myself.

[psychobunny]

Gulp is cool too, but right now we have some decent amount of technical debt having built LESS compilation and JS minification into NodeBB itself as opposed to using Grunt / Gulp etc. So stay tuned to https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/3543 we'll be trying to cut down on this towards 1.0

psychobunny created this issue in NodeBB/NodeBB

open Deprecating meta.js #3543

[PitaJ]

@psychobunny @julian

What does that code actually do?

I'm trying to figure this out because I'm working on a template system myself. To me, comparing compiled templates to uncompiled ones, it looks like this compilation doesn't really do much at all. Wouldn't a better compilation system compile templates into executable functions?

[julian]

Templates can be located in lots of places... src/views for ACP, the theme itself for everything else, plugins can also introduce templates.

.compile() just collects them all and puts them (or links them) in public/templates

[PitaJ]

@julian that's way simpler than I thought the compilation was doing, although the code makes sense now (comments help with that, too )

@psychobunny should really get working on compiling templates into JavaScript functions. It would probably speed up your rendering fairly significantly.

String#replace is actually a very slow operation compared to concatenation.

[psychobunny]

Yeah its on my todo for tjs 1.0