CoffeeScript in Node.js

I'm throwing together a Node.js and Express application at the moment and trying out in anger a few of the technologies I've read about but not practiced. One of those of CoffeeScript.

The CoffeeScript compiler is primarily available implemented on Node.js as a command line utility. You might expect that for Node.js projects, there should be a way where compilation could be handled transparently without intermediate Javascript files during development.

And you would be right. But how it works is not well documented, and so I wanted to make a note of that here. I found the information in a blog post by Max Aller.

Here is the summary for an application-homed install:

1. Include coffee-script in your application package.json dependencies:
   package.json
   

   {
     snipped...
     "dependencies": {
       "express": "3.0.6",
       "jade": "*",
       "coffee-script": "*"
     }
     snipped...
   }
   

2. Install dependences ( npm install in the application folder)
3. Import the module: require('coffee-script'); in your application

Once done, the .coffee extension is transparently compiled to Javascript in any require() statement.

For example:

require('coffee-script');
require('./myCoffeeScriptFile');
# will find, parse and execute ./myCoffeeScriptFile.coffee