Middleware for handle pushState working inside yeoman development server.

Readme.md

• So, if you start / it will load index.html normally.
• All assets files has extension rather then .html, so middleware won't interact with the flow
• If you go to /books middleware will intercept the flow. It calls lrSnippet for augment res.write method to have Live Reload feature event in intercepted pages.
• The only problem can be if you have any other .html files you want to process normally as static file
• Pipe thing thanks to https://github.com/thedjpetersen

app.coffee

class App extends Backbone.Router
  routes:
    '': 'index'
    'books': 'booksList'

  initialize: ->
    console.log "Constructor"

  index: ->
    console.log "Init page"

  booksList: ->
    console.log "Booklist"

  start: ->
    Backbone.history.start pushState: true

window.app = new App()

$ -> app.start()

Gruntfile.js

// Generated on 2013-03-01 using generator-webapp 0.1.5
'use strict';
var lrSnippet = require('grunt-contrib-livereload/lib/utils').livereloadSnippet;
var mountFolder = function (connect, dir) {
    return connect.static(require('path').resolve(dir));
};

var pushStateHook = function (url) {
  var path = require('path');
  var request = require('request'); // Need to be added into package.json
  return function (req, res, next) {
    var ext = path.extname(req.url);
    if ((ext == "" || ext === ".html") && req.url != "/") {
      req.pipe(request(url)).pipe(res);
    } else {
      next();
    }
  };
};

module.exports = function (grunt) {
    // load all grunt tasks
    require('matchdep').filterDev('grunt-*').forEach(grunt.loadNpmTasks);

    // configurable paths
    var yeomanConfig = {
        app: 'app',
        dist: 'dist'
    };

    grunt.initConfig({
        // All other configs
        
        connect: {
            options: {
                port: 9000,
                hostname: 'localhost'
            },
            livereload: {
                options: {
                    middleware: function (connect) {
                        return [
                            pushStateHook("http://localhost:9000"),
                            lrSnippet,
                            mountFolder(connect, '.tmp'),
                            mountFolder(connect, 'app')
                        ];
                    }
                }
            },
            // All other config
        },
        
        // All other config
    });

  // Standard Gruntfile.js content
};

Thank you so much, @soswow, for sharing this. I've spent the last couple of hours trying to figure out, how to make the connect's middleware to work as a simple static file server, that will always return index.html, so I could than handle things with backbone router, and I finally did.