Sails.js with Handlebars — or any other template engine

A calm sea never made a skillful sailor

A quick recipe for configuring Sails.js with handlebars template engine or any other template engines supported by consolidate.js. Handlebars is handy in server side rendering of your pages. In my experience, using a server side template engine over a Single Page Application (SPA) has the benefit of loading super fast. And Speed is essential for

• Reducing Bounce Rate
• Search Engine Ranking
• Driving Conversions

Prerequisites

This recipe considers that you have a basic Sails.js project setup already. Else setup one first.

1. Install Handlebars & Consolidate

Consolidate is a template engine library that helps configure any supported template engines to work with (in our case) Sails.js.

npm i -S handlebars consolidate

2. Configure the Template Engine

Make changes to config/views.js file to use Handlebars

module.exports.views = {
  extension: 'handlebars',
  layout: 'layouts/layout',
  getRenderFn: () => {
    // Import `consolidate`.
    var cons = require('consolidate');
    // Return the rendering function for Handlebars
    return cons.handlebars;
  },
};

3. Configure Task

In tasks/config/sails-linker.js file, replace all the occurrences of .ejs with .handlebars.

That’s it. A good rule of thumb is to have the latest version of Node.js, and Sailer.js. And don’t forget to restart the server…