ssr-for-bots

Basic SSR middleware for Express. Use to prerender your pages for bots so they can read your meta-data if you're using a client side rendering app, or if you want to boost your website SEO score.

Note: this module uses puppeteer. It also stores all the prendered pages to an internal cache store. It's fine for boosting SEO scores, and making the bots able to read meta-data (In case of a React CRA app for example) but it might not produce the desired effect when attempting to use it to serve your pages to users. If you need a more viable solution, I recommend using a framework that uses SSR by default.

Install

$ npm install --save ssr-for-bots

Or if you're using yarn

$ yarn add ssr-for-bots

Usage

For a server where the ssr service should be applied:

const ssrForBots = require("ssr-for-bots");

const defaultOptions = {
  prerender: [], // Array containing the user-agents that will trigger the ssr service | uses Regex
  exclude: [], // Array containing paths and/or extentions that will be excluded from being prerendered by the ssr service | uses Regex
  useCache: true, // Variable that determins if we will use page caching or not
  cacheRefreshRate: 86400, // Seconds of which the cache will be kept alive, pass 0 or negative value for infinite lifespan
};

// If  you're service an API on a route called /api for example add it too the exclude :
// exclude: ["/api/"]

//  apply to all requests
app.use(ssrForBots());

// or if you want to use options
app.use(ssrForBots(defaultOptions));

Configuration options

prerender

Array containing the user-agents that will trigger the ssr service uses Regex.

Note: The array you pass will be added to the default array list.

Defaults to ["bot","googlebot","Chrome-Lighthouse","DuckDuckBot","ia_archiver","bingbot","yandex","baiduspider","Facebot","facebookexternalhit","facebookexternalhit/1.1","twitterbot","rogerbot","linkedinbot","embedly","quora link preview","showyoubot","outbrain","pinterest","slackbot","vkShare","W3C_Validator"].

exclude

Array containing the paths that will be excluded from the ssr service uses Regex.

Note: The array you pass will be added to the default array list.

Defaults to [".xml", ".ico", ".txt", ".json"].

Example if you're serving an API on /api path add : ["/api/"] it will exclude all paths that contains "/api/"

useCache

Determins if you want to use cache or not.

The service uses a map to cache all prerendered urls and will return them immediatly if they're cached.

Defaults to true

cacheRefreshRate

Cache refresh rate will determine the cache life span expressed in seconds.

If a page has been cached for more than the cache refresh rate, it will be removed from cache, rerendered and put back to cache right after.

Defaults to 86400 : 24 hours

License

MIT © Montassar Laribi