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It’s ages since I’ve used Backbone but I’ve needed to in the past few days. I also needed to use Handlebars templates with it.

I’ve spent far too long today trying to understand why when I tried to do that I kept getting an error message “Backbone is not defined”.

You see my previous ‘old-style’ use of Backbone was a plain old ‘HTML with script tags’ page which did it’s templates the Underscore way and  which included the relevant scripts something like this :

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.2.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/underscore.js/1.8.3/underscore-min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/backbone.js/1.3.3/backbone-min.js"></script>

So when I wanted to switch from Underscore templates to Handlebar templates I just dropped the reference to Underscore and include a reference to Handlebars like this

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.2.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/handlebars.js/4.0.6/handlebars.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/backbone.js/1.3.3/backbone-min.js"></script>

And that’s when I got the error message “Backbone is not defined”  … for a painfully long time.

Well long story short it seems that in order to use Handlebars in that way you have to include Underscore as well like this :

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.2.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/handlebars.js/4.0.6/handlebars.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/underscore.js/1.8.3/underscore-min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/backbone.js/1.3.3/backbone-min.js"></script>

I still have yet to see it written down that you need to do this but it works ! I was put on the right path by this gist https://gist.github.com/kyleondata/3440492 .

Of course if I’d done something contemporary like use browserify in the first place I suspect I wouldn’t have has this problem but if you’re doing it old school then this is what I suggest you do.

Hope it helps.