SSR Helper

This pacakge aims to simplify Meteor's server rendering process. Specifically:

1. Make Meteor.User() works during server rendering, accessing Meteor.user() during Meteor server rendering process will result in Meteor.userId can only be invoked in method calls or publications this is because the Meteor DDP session has not been instaniated yet. However, it is a common to require the user object in order to personalize the server render page thus the package will patch Meteor.user() to make it work during SSR.

2. Simplify the marshaling of data from server to client during SSR.

Installation

$ meteor add alawi:ssr-helper

Usage

Server:

import { SSRServerHelper } from 'meteor/alawi:ssr-helper';

onPageLoad(async sink => {
    
    // Meteor.user() will work as expected, instead of throwing out of context error.
    console.log(Meteor.user())
   
    // Instantiate the server helper.
    const ssrHelper = new SSRServerHelper(sink);
    
    // Set items to be passed to the client.
    ssrHelper.setItem('count', {name: '1'});
   
    // Inject the data to the page body. 
    // It will also inject user doc by default.
    ssrHelper.injectData();
});

Client:

Somewhere in the client initialization code:

import { SSRClientHelper } from 'meteor/alawi:ssr-helper';

// Process the injected SSR data.
SSRClientHelper.processData();

// Get the SSR data.
console.log(SSRClientHelper.getItem('name'));

// SSR user is injected by default when inject() is called.
console.log(SSRClientHelper.getItem('user'));

How

A cookie is set when the user is logged-in to keep track of their state. The cookie them gets passed to the server on the http initial request which is then used to fetch the user doc from the users collection.

The data is then injected in the body of the server rendered page. The client parses the injected data and store in the session storage.

Security

Using the user token to fetch the user data when doing SSR has some security concerns that were discussed here, and here.

Next Steps

• Patch Meteor.userId on the server during SSR
• Patch Meteor.user() at the client during SSR

Credits

The code is based on the snippets from kadira's fast render package.