Rendertron

Rendertron is a headless Chrome rendering solution designed to render & serialise web pages on the fly.

:hammer: Built with Puppeteer

:cloud: Easy deployment to Google Cloud

:mag: Improves SEO

Rendertron is designed to enable your Progressive Web App (PWA) to serve the correct
content to any bot that doesn't render or execute JavaScript. Rendertron runs as a
standalone HTTP server. Rendertron renders requested pages using Headless Chrome,
auto-detecting when your PWA has completed loading
and serializes the response back to the original request. To use Rendertron, your application
configures middleware to determine whether to proxy a request to Rendertron.
Rendertron is compatible with all client side technologies, including web components.

Demo endpoint

A demo Rendertron service is available at https://render-tron.appspot.com/. It is not designed
to be used as a production endpoint. You can use it, but there are no uptime guarantees.

Contents

• Middleware
• API
  • Render
  • Screenshot
• FAQ
  • Query parameters
  • Auto detecting loading function
  • Rendering budget timeout
  • Web components
  • Status codes
• Installing & deploying
  • Building
  • Running locally
  • Deploying to Google Cloud Platform
  • Deploying using Docker
  • Config
  • Troubleshooting

Middleware

Once you have the service up and running, you'll need to implement the differential serving
layer. This checks the user agent to determine whether prerendering is required.

This is a list of middleware available to use with the Rendertron service:

• Express.js middleware
• Firebase functions (Community maintained)
• ASP.net core middleware (Community maintained)
• Python (Django) middleware and decorator (Community maintained)

Rendertron is also compatible with prerender.io middleware.
Note: the user agent lists differ there.

API

Render

GET /render/<url>

The render endpoint will render your page and serialize your page. Options are
specified as query parameters:

• mobile defaults to false. Enable by passing ?mobile to request the
  mobile version of your site.
• refreshCache: Pass refreshCache=true to ignore potentially cached render results
  and treat the request as if it is not cached yet.
  The new render result is used to replace the previous result.

Screenshot

GET /screenshot/<url>
POST /screenshot/<url>

The screenshot endpoint can be used to verify that your page is rendering
correctly.

Both endpoints support the following query parameters:

• width defaults to 1000 - specifies viewport width.
• height defaults to 1000 - specifies viewport height.
• mobile defaults to false. Enable by passing ?mobile to request the
  mobile version of your site.

Additional options are available as a JSON string in the POST body. See
Puppeteer documentation
for available options. You cannot specify the type (defaults to jpeg) and
encoding (defaults to binary) parameters.

FAQ

Query parameters

When setting query parameters as part of your URL, ensure they are encoded correctly. In JS,
this would be encodeURIComponent(myURLWithParams). For example to specify page=home:

https://render-tron.appspot.com/render/http://my.domain/%3Fpage%3Dhome

Auto detecting loading function

The service detects when a page has loaded by looking at the page load event, ensuring there
are no outstanding network requests and that the page has had ample time to render.

Rendering budget timeout

There is a hard limit of 10 seconds for rendering. Ensure you don't hit this budget by ensuring
your application is rendered well before the budget expires.

Web components

Headless Chrome supports web components but shadow DOM is difficult to serialize effectively.
As such, shady DOM (a lightweight shim for Shadow DOM)
is required for web components.

If you are using web components v0 (deprecated), you will need to enable Shady DOM to
render correctly. In Polymer 1.x, which uses web components v0, Shady DOM is enabled by default.
If you are using Shadow DOM, override this by setting the query parameter dom=shady when
directing requests to the Rendertron service.

If you are using web components v1 and either webcomponents-lite.js or webcomponents-loader.js,
set the query parameter wc-inject-shadydom=true when directing requests to the Rendertron
service. This renderer service will force the necessary polyfills to be loaded and enabled.

Status codes

Status codes from the initial requested URL are preserved. If this is a 200, or 304, you can
set the HTTP status returned by the rendering service by adding a meta tag.

<meta name="render:status_code" content="404" />

Running locally

To install Rendertron and run it locally, first install Rendertron:

npm install -g rendertron

With Chrome installed on your machine run the Rendertron CLI:

rendertron

Installing & deploying

Building

Clone and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron.git
cd rendertron
npm install
npm run build

Running locally

With a local instance of Chrome installed, you can start the server locally:

npm run start

Deploying to Google Cloud Platform

gcloud app deploy app.yaml --project <your-project-id>

Deploying using Docker

Rendertron no longer includes a Docker file. Instead, refer to
Puppeteer documentation
on how to deploy run headless Chrome in Docker.

Config

When deploying the service, set configuration variables by including a config.json in the
root. Available configuration options:

• timeout default 10000 - set the timeout used to render the target page.
• port default 3000 - set the port to use for running and listening the rendertron service. Note if process.env.PORT is set, it will be used instead.
• host default 0.0.0.0 - set the hostname to use for running and listening the rendertron service. Note if process.env.HOST is set, it will be used instead.
• width default 1000 - set the width (resolution) to be used for rendering the page.
• height default 1000 - set the height (resolution) to be used for rendering the page.
• cache default null - set to datastore to enable caching on Google Cloud using datastore or to memory to enable in-memory caching

Troubleshooting

If you're having troubles with getting Headless Chrome to run in your
environment, refer to the
troubleshooting guide
for Puppeteer.