Customize SSR

[tatchi]

Hi @lukeed,

Thanks for this amazing project, it sounds really exciting :)

I'm playing a little bit with it and I'm wondering if there's a technique to customise the way the pages are server rendered?

For instance, in projects like Razzle, you have access to a server.js file where you can customize the code. With this approach, you can support libraries like styled-components, Apollo etc...

Currently, I don't see anything in the doc that could support that. Did I miss something or is there a plan to support that in the future?

[lukeed]

Hey, thanks!

Not sure I fully understand the question. There's isn't actually SSR in here. The export command spins up Chrome Headless and scrapes the HTML from your route(s); so it's the same markup you'd see if you opened up the page(s) in your browser and inspected the current DOM tree.

Razzle is meant for SSR applications, while PWA is client-side only... the export is somewhat of a bridge, mostly because it offers great performance boosts & follows the Progress Web App recommendations.

What were you looking to do?

[tatchi]

Thanks for the answer. I don't know a lot about pwa and indeed, I think I've misunderstood.

I disabled javascript on the demo application created with the CLI, and everything was still working so I had the impression that the page was server rendered (I get the full HTML page).

Therefore, I wanted to be able to include data coming from external libraries like styled-components or Apollo in these HTML generated pages. So even if you disable javascript (or for the first time you access the page), you get in the generated HTML styles from styled-components and data from Apollo Query component.

But it seems like it's not how PWA applications work. I'll read some documentation on this topic to get more familiar (https://developers.google.com/web/ilt/pwa/)

[lukeed]

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, PWA doesn't do that. Its export is plain "pre-rendered" HTML. As mentioned, it's whatever was on the page. This is why the page still works without JavaScript enabled.

I'd recommend running a pwa init with "Router" selected... then npm run build and you'll see what the exported files look like. For example, after building, you'll see build/blog/index.html with all the articles on the page, despite the fact that they're rendered dynamically within the app.

[tatchi]

Cool, thanks for the clarification! :)