A gulp plugin to precompile handlebars templates, and output separate compiled templates that use the exports syntax. It is easy to use the plugin gulp-define-module to wrap the compiled templates in a module bundling syntax. Precompiling is required when you want to enable Content Security Policy on your server, as handlebars, compiling in the client, uses eval or new Function(String) which is not allowed. If you precompile, you can just use the runtime version of Handlebars which doesn't have the compilation code.

npm install gulp-precompile-handlebars

The plugin takes a stream of multiple files and returns the compiled result. It is up to you to rename those files and move them to a specific folder. This example uses the gulp-rename plugin for changing the extension and gulp-define-module to wrap it with the desired module definition.

var gulp = require('gulp');
var rename = require('gulp-rename');
var defineModule = require('gulp-define-module');
var precompileHandlebars = require('gulp-precompile-handlebars');

return gulp.src('src/templates/*.hbs')
  .pipe(precompileHandlebars())
  .pipe(rename({ extname: '.js' }))
  .pipe(defineModule('es6'))
  .pipe(gulp.dest('src/templates'));

Precompile Handlebars consumes an optional configuration parameter and passes it on to the handlebars precompile function precompileHandlebars({noEscape: true}), but you can also use the gulp-front-matter plugin to attach compile settings to your files front matter for some, specific control:

---
noEscape: true
---
<div>{{foo}}</div>

You can now use handlebars-runtime in your project instead of the full version.

// import handlebars runtime
import handleBars from 'handlebars/handlebars.runtime.js';

// grab the compiled template
import compiledTemplate from 'path/to/compiled/template.js';

// execute the template with optional data
var parsed = compiledTemplate({ foo: 'bar' });