Hi there. Is there any plans to support a pre rendering service? This is so SPA applications can have certain pages pre rendered with SEO meta tags
We are currently evaluating this and have an open feature request on our feedback page: Prerendering support | Feature Requests | Render
You can upvote the request and potentially give more information on your use case so we can gauge interest and notify you of any updates.
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Hey, I just tried an example repository using the prerender.io tool, and it worked, but you will have to deploy this as a web service, and not a static site since the content is dynamically served.
Thanks. Yea unfortunately I am using a SPA so I don’t have a server in front for the client side. Otherwise the prerender tool would be good option
It seems I may be able to setup a web service and use nginx in front. As pre render has a nginx config - Official prerender.io nginx.conf for nginx (github.com)
Is there a repo or template I can use as a starting point for a Nginx + Static SPA build (with nodejs environment) dockerfile setup?
This would be an awesome feature
We don’t have an example repo nor doc page for that, but you can refer to either the doc you have from prerender.io or this one: javascript - Using prerender with proxy in nginx - Stack Overflow to create your nginx service on Render with a docker image that you create, where you can set rewrites to your static site URL. Here is the official GitHub repo for nginx Dockerfile examples: GitHub - nginxinc/docker-nginx: Official NGINX Dockerfiles
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Got it thanks - btw is the Dockerfile used to deploy static sites on Render (using yarn install & build etc) open source? and do you use nginx internally?
Hi @viperfx, the Dockerfile is not currently open source, but there’s a good chance we will choose to open source it in the future once we can do so safely and securely. In the meantime I’d be happy to answer any specific questions you have about the build environment for static sites. We don’t use nginx internally to my knowledge.
Hi @david I’m having a similar situation as @viperfx where I have a static front-end SPA and would like to intercept bot user agents and send them to a pre-render service. I understand this is not a feature you currently offer, but is there another solution that you would recommend that is feasible for someone without a devops background?
Hi @Moon, sorry for the delayed response. You could use a Render web service rather than a static site and inspect the user agent for incoming requests. The disadvantage of this approach is that it’s more expensive (starting at $7/month vs. free) and doesn’t use a CDN to serve your static content. If your site loads and renders in a reasonable amount of time, pre-rendering may not give you much an SEO boost anyhow. I’d recommend using Google Lighthouse to measure your site’s core web vitals before you decide that you want pre-rendering.
Hi there,
We don’t have any part in submitting services to Google search indexes, this is something you do yourself and can take a while for Google to start indexing,
Regards,
John B
Render Support, UTC+1 