feat(gatsby-plugin-preload-fonts): preload used fonts

[superhawk610]

Description

Fonts don't start downloading until the browser knows they're needed. Which means that the browser has to download/parse the HTML & CSS and start rendering a section of the page before it knows to start downloading the font.

This can cause significant delays in loading fonts.

A common suggestion is to add a to the page for each font that's used on the page so the browser knows to start downloading the font files immediately.

This plugin enables a two-step process for embedding <link preload> tags into each statically rendered page in your build output:

1. Run the included puppeteer script to scrape every route in your application and generate a mapping from routes to fonts.
2. Add the plugin to your gatsby-config.js and these tags will be automagically embedded into each page at build time.

TODO

• list all application routes
• determine what fonts are required on each route
• cache resource mapping between builds to prevent unnecessarily scrapes
• inject tags at build time
• configuration
• docs
• tests

Related Issues

Closes #14281.

[superhawk610]

I'm currently working on unit tests but I figured I could go ahead and get some feedback on the plugin layout/implementation - in particular, I'm curious how my approach to the following tasks fit the Gatsby ecosystem:

• cache directory
• logging
• route fetching

[ghost]

Subscribed to this! Thanks for taking this on @superhawk610

[wardpeet]

Thanks for taking this one on! Looks pretty good.

I wonder if we can implement this as a real gatsby plugin instead of a seperate script. This gives us the opportunity to use the gatsby-cli reporter & gatsby cache.

We could look into https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/node-apis/#onCreateDevServer to run puppeteer when the dev server is running.

What do you think?

[superhawk610]

@wardpeet I went with a separate script to follow the idea proposed in the original linked issue; I'm cool with either integrating with the dev server directly or having that as an option, my only concern is that this is a costly operation (minutes on smaller projects and potentially hours on larger projects). I added some basic route caching to prevent crawling if the list of routes hasn't changed, perhaps I should make that more granular and only crawl new routes by default?

cc @KyleAMathews: what are your thoughts on having the font-scraping script run onCreateDevServer vs manually via a package script?

[KyleAMathews]

Yeah — my guess that this would be a really costly operation so best done in a periodic cron job — it looks like your testing has confirmed that so let's keep it a separate script.

[KyleAMathews]

Looking good!

Could you include a screenshot of what a run of the script looks like?

[superhawk610]

Here's a couple screen recordings of the preload script:

Initial Run

Subsequent Run(s)

[wardpeet]

This looks really good! I added a few comments/questions but this is ready to go! Well done! 👏

[superhawk610]

Hey, sorry about the delay, I put this on the backburner until #15475 was addressed but it never was. I'll try and get a commit addressing @wardpeet's most recent feedback this week, hopefully the versioning thing will have sorted itself out.

EDIT: I'm beginning a new job this week, so I haven't had any free time to work on this. I'll get final review changes up as soon as I get the time :)

[wardpeet]

Oh yeah, it got fixed. I missed your issue. It would be awesome to get this one shipped 🤗.

[superhawk610]

@wardpeet Should be g2g 🔥

[wardpeet]

Awesome! 🔥 I'll fix tests and give this plugin one more try and i'll merge afterwards! Thanks for your hard work. This is going to be awesome!

[wardpeet]

🤞 I believe this one is going to be the one. Tests node 8 works so. Thanks @superhawk610 for this plugin. Like I said before, this is awesome!

[wardpeet]

@superhawk610 we have published your plugin gatsby-plugin-preload-fonts@1.0.0

[universse]

Is this recommended for self-hosted fonts?

[sidharthachatterjee]

@universse Yeah, should be beneficial whether self hosted or not

[universse]

Cause I was trying to run the script "preload-fonts": "gatsby-preload-fonts" and got error

err could not establish a connection with the dev server
     attempted connection to http://localhost:8000/___graphql

So I started dev server, and run the scripts, which gives me this output

// font-preload-cache.json
{
  ...
  "assets": {
    "/": {
      "http://localhost:8000/static/Spectral-ExtraBold-76dd69dbe4b4ddc4f3923bf08e883d43.woff2": true,
      ....
    },
  }
}

This works if fonts are loaded from external sources since you get absolute external urls. That's not the case for self-hosted ones with relative urls. So I guess there needs to be a way to configure the origin. Not sure if i'm missing anything though.

[wardpeet]

@universse good catch, you could add a PR to actually check the url if it matches the dev server we strip out the domain.

[universse]

I made a PR #17235

[chocobuckle]

Maybe I'm missing something simple, but just curious as to how one is meant to use this with continuous deployment? If I run gatsby develop and then gatsby build locally then all works as expected, but when I push a commit and Netlify starts building my site then it obviously errors with a "err could not establish a connection with the dev server" message. Please explain, as if to an idiot! :)

[superhawk610]

You'll need to tweak your CD config to run the dev server in the background, then run gatsby-preload-fonts, then kill the dev server once that's complete. I'm not totally sure of the best way to accomplish this on Netlify, perhaps @masives can shed some light?

[nandorojo]

@superhawk610 Similar question to @chocobuckle here. Any idea how to get this to work on Gatsby Cloud when I deploy?

[superhawk610]

@nandorojo I'm not super familiar with Gatsby Cloud configuration, but from the docs it seems like the best way to accomplish this would be to add a postinstall script that does what I suggested above, something like

// package.json
"scripts": {
  "postinstall": "scripts/update-font-preloads.sh"
}

// scripts/update-font-preloads.sh
#!/bin/bash
export CI=1 # Gatsby Cloud may set this for you, in which case
            # it's unnecessary; just make sure it's set or the
            # crawler will hang indefiniely waiting for input

echo "spinning up dev server..."
./node_modules/.bin/gatsby develop &
SERVER_PID=$!

echo "crawling routes to check for font preloads..."
./node_modules/.bin/gatsby-preload-fonts &
CRAWLER_PID=$!

wait $CRAWLER_PID
echo "done!"

kill -9 $SERVER_PID

(I haven't tested this but that's the basic idea)

[botteu]

I'm in the same boat as @chocobuckle . We're hosting on Netlify and the build script is run when we push to branch X, but since the font mapping needs gatsby develop to run, it doesn't work.

[masives]

@botteu I think you'd need to write a node script that would

1. Spawn a process with gatsby develop
2. Wait for gatsby dev server to be available
3. Run the font preloading script
4. Kill the server

[botteu]

@masives Yep. But I was hoping to avoid that 😉 But thanks anyways 👍