react-ssr

Overview

react-ssr is a minimalistic solution to achieve server-side rendering with a few lines of code and a simple ruleset. The simple ruleset is outlined with performance in mind, and must be followed to server side render React apps effectively.

Installation

$ npm install react-ssr --save
$ npm install babel-plugin-react-ssr --save-dev

Adding to your server

Firstly, you'll need to use the module on your Node server and have some static routes of your app setup. The below example uses express:

• Your Node JS express server server.js

import express from 'express'
import cohere from 'react-cohere'
import routes from './routes'

const app = express()
const renderer = cohere({ routes })

app.get('*', renderer) // send all routes to Cohere

• Static routes of your React app routes.js

import HomePage from './HomePage'
import NotFoundPage from './NotFoundPage'

const routes = [
  {
    path: '/',
    exact: true,
    component: HomePage
  },
  {
    path: '/about',
    redirect: '/'
  },
  {
    path: '**',
    component: NotFoundPage
  }
]

export default routes

Fetching data

There's one important rule: If you want to make a data call, and you'd like it to be server side rendered correctly, you'll need to use a special method for this. It's a static method that sits in your React component called fetchData. react-ssr will execute this before it begins rendering your app on the server and inject the result of it into the components props.

Here's an example:

class Navigation extends React.Component {
  static fetchData () {
    const pageContent = new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
      fetch('/api')
        .then(res => res.json())
        .then(resolve)
        .catch(reject)
    })

    return {
      content: pageContent // becomes available as this.props.content
    }
  }

  render () {
    console.log()
    return <span />
  }

🏆 You should now have server-side rendering setup. There's still a few extra things to think about to make this work for more advanced applications. Continue reading to find out more.

License

MIT