Precompiling handlebars template with custom helpers

Question

I have a message.handlebars template which works perfect when compiling it in the browser.

I precompiled it with handlebars -message.handlebars -f -message.js successfuly.

Then in my ASP.NET MVC site I'm adding the references as:

<script src="~/Scripts/handlebars.runtime-v1.3.0.js"></script>
<script src="~/Scripts/handlebars-helpers.js"></script>
<script src="~/Scripts/templates/message.js"></script>

The handlebars-helpers.js contains some custom helpers used by the message template.

I took this approach from this guy's comment, but it's not working. I'm getting an error when doing var html = Handlebars.templates.message(data);. Again this works perfectly when compiling it in the browser, so it's not a problem of context.

The error I'm getting is:

Is this the correct approach to precompile and use custom helpers? Or is there a way to include those helpers in the precompiled template?

Answer 1

It was the version of handlebars on the server. NPM installs the latest by default and the version 2 alpha was causing the issue. Found this fix on Github (https://github.com/wycats/handlebars.js/issues/734):

npm uninstall handlebars -g
npm install handlebars@1.3 -g

Everything working!