Using $compile on external template (templateURL) in Angular directive
You can use the $templateRequest service to get the template. This is a convenience service that also caches the template in $templateCache, so that only a single request to template.html is made.
As an illustration (and without going into the issue of recursive directives), this is used like so:
link: function(scope, element){ $templateRequest("template.html").then(function(html){ var template = angular.element(html); element.append(template); $compile(template)(scope); });};plunker (check the network tab to see a single network request)
I prefer to use $http to load template if its size is bigger:-
$http.get('mytemp.html').then(function(response) { element.html(response.data); $compile(element.contents())(scope); });