Server Side Rendering for Meteor

Thanks to meteorhacks:ssr, you can now render Blaze templates on the server very easily, and you can assign helpers to server-side templates as well.

Installation

meteor add meteorhacks:ssr

Usage

Let's say we have a template in client/postList.html

(Note: You must create your tempalate in a place it can be seen by the client. We are not loading the template via the browser, but in order to be built templates need to be on the client.)

<template name='postList'>
  <ul>
    {{#each posts query}}
      <li>{{title}}</li>
    {{/each}}
  </ul>
</template>

Now we can define a template handler in lib/postList.js. By defining a template handler in lib, we make it available to both the client and the server. You could also define more than one helper.

Template.postList.posts = function(query) {
  Posts.find(query);
}

Now let's render postList server-side:

var query = {category: 'kadira'};
var data = {query: query};
var renderedHTML = SSR.render('postList', data); 

API

SSR.render(template, data)

You can render a template with data. For the template argument, you can either pass the name of the template or the actual template instance itself.

SSR.compileTemplate(templateName, stringTemplateContent)

You can use this API to compile templates on the server. For example:

SSR.compileTemplate('title', '<b>Hello {{user}}</b>');

// access the compiled template
Template.title.user = function() {
  return "Arunoda Susiripala";
};

You can also define you templates in the /private directry and compile them as shown below.

SSR.compileTemplate('title', Assets.getText('title.html'));

What Can Be Done With SSR

Since this is the full Blaze API on the server, you can have sub-templates, dynamic templates, and all of Blaze's awesome features. These are the few things you can do with SSR:

• Render HTML pages for SEO bots.
• Render HTML pages for some of your routes (you may need to serve HTML yourself).
• Build SEO aware static sites.
• Handle email templates with Blaze.

Wow, How Did You Do This?!

Actually, most of this stuff had already been done by Meteor, so kudos to the Meteor team.

• This package loads all your exisitng client side templates on the server side.
• This also adds some patches to Blaze.
• Finally, this package comes with a nice and clean API to render templates.