Is it necessary to use JADE when building Angular Apps with Node and Express?

Question

Is it possible to build angularJS apps with plain HTML, ExpressJS on NodeJS ?

Answer 1

No it is not necessary, you can use different templating engines with Node & Express or you can just send pure HTML files.

Jade is just a default templating engine that comes with Express.js, If you want a templating engine that is close to bare html i think dust.js is a good one.

Quite frankly angular.js has nothing to do with this.

You can set up express to render pure html files like this.

app.configure(function(){

  app.set("view options", {
     layout: false
  });

  app.register('.html', {
    compile: function(string, options){
      return function(locals){
        return string;
      };
    }
  });

});

Then just render like this

app.get('/myUrl', function(request, response){
  response.render("index.html");
});

or, when I was using ember on the frontend it was so conflicting to write handlebars templates in jade templates, so in my jade template I simply included a pure html file like this.

include '/handlebars/templates.html';