Piggy In The Middle

Express/Connect middleware for transpiling to html/css/js on-the-fly. Also gives you sourcemaps, caching for unchanged files and integrates well with live reload tools like browser-sync and live-reload.

Currently supports: LiveScript, babel, coco, coffee-script, dogescript, less, marked, myth, jade, node-sass, stylus, swig.

It works a bit like this:

1. A request comes in for app.js
2. app.js can not be found (404)
3. PITM will look for files that compile to app.js
4. It finds app.coffee
5. app.coffee is compiled on-the-fly
6. The compiled output is served to the browser as app.js

Subsequent requests will not force a recompile file because PITM will cache the output. PITM is smart and will watch the source file(s) for changes, if you change a source file then it will do a recompile on next request.

Try it out

The easiest way to try this out is to clone the repo, cd into it and do:

npm install
npm run example

This will start a basic demo site using PITM.

Use as middleware

Here's a really simple example:

var connect = require('connect');
var serveStatic = require('serve-static');
var pitm = require('piggy-in-the-middle');

var app = connect();

app.use(serveStatic('/path/to/your/site'));
app.use(pitm('/path/to/your/site'));

app.listen(3000);

Once initialized PITM will also emit 'fileChanged' events whenever a watched file is changed, this is useful for doing live reloading of the browser. For example, to integrate PITM with browser-sync you can do something like this:

var pitm = require('piggy-in-the-middle');
var browserSync = require('browser-sync').create();

var piggy = pitm('/path/to/your/site');
piggy.events.on('fileChanged', browserSync.reload);

Custom Path To node_modules

global.babyTolkCompilerModulePath = '/some/folder/node_modules';
pitm('/path/to/your/site');

By default PITM will look for compatible modules in the node_modules dir inside of /path/to/your/site. You can set global.babyTolkCompilerModulePath to look for compatible node modules in a different dir, like in the example above: /some/other/dir/node_modules.