plugin-renderer-puppeteer

Overview

A Greenwood plugin for using Puppeteer as a custom pre-rendering solution. As Puppeteer is a headless browser, it provides a lot more power and capabilities for fully rendering things like Web Components, GraphQL calls, and other very browser dependent features. For more information and complete docs on Greenwood, please visit our website.

This package assumes you already have @greenwood/cli installed.

Installation

You can use your favorite JavaScript package manager to install this package.

# npm
$ npm i -D @greenwood/plugin-renderer-puppeteer

# yarn
$ yarn add @greenwood/plugin-renderer-puppeteer --dev

# pnpm
$ pnpm add -D @greenwood/plugin-renderer-puppeteer

Usage

Add this plugin to your greenwood.config.js:

import { greenwoodPluginRendererPuppeteer } from '@greenwood/plugin-renderer-puppeteer';

export default {
  // ...

  plugins: [
    greenwoodPluginRendererPuppeteer()
  ]
}

Now, when running greenwood build, all your pages will get run through Puppeteer and any JavaScript / Web Components that you author will get a one time pass execution and the resulting HTML generated from that process will be captured and further optimized through Greenwood's build pipeline.

Caveats

Limitations

Given this plugin instruments an entire browser, this plugin only supports Greenwood's prerender configuration option and so will NOT be viable for any SSR or Serverless and Edge features. Instead, Greenwood will be focusing on making WCC the default and recommended first-party solution.

In addition, puppeteer also leverages npm postinstall scripts which in some environments, like Stackblitz, would be disabled and so YMMV.

Dependencies

You may need to install additional Operating System level libraries and dependencies depending on the system you are running on to support headless Chrome. For example, for a Docker based environment like GitHub Actions, you would need to add this below setup script (or similar) to your runner

#!/usr/bin/bash

# path/to/your/chromium-lib-install.sh
sudo apt-get update \\
  && sudo apt-get install -yq libgconf-2-4 \\
  && sudo apt-get install -y wget --no-install-recommends \\
  && sudo wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add - \\
  && sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list' \\
  && sudo apt-get update \\
  && sudo apt-get install -y google-chrome-unstable fonts-ipafont-gothic fonts-wqy-zenhei fonts-thai-tlwg fonts-kacst fonts-freefont-ttf --no-install-recommends \\
  && sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

jobs:
 build:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v1
      - name: Install Chromium Library Dependencies
        run: |
         sh path/to/your/chromium-lib-install.sh
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
           node-version: "18.x"

See the Puppeteer Troubleshooting docs for more info on setting up your specific environment.