🚀 Rust server side rendering

The project aims to enable server side rendering on rust servers in the simplest and lightest way possible.

It use an embedded version of the v8 javascript engine (rusty_v8) to parse and evaluate a built bundle file and return a string with the rendered html.

Currently it works with Webpack bundler v5.65.0.

Getting started

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
ssr_rs = "0.3.0"

Example

To render to string a bundled react project the application should perform the following calls.

use ssr_rs::Ssr;
use std::fs::read_to_string;

fn main() {
    Ssr::create_platform();

    let source = read_to_string("./path/to/build.js").unwrap();

    let mut js = Ssr::new(&source, "entryPoint").unwrap();

    let html = js.render_to_string(None).unwrap();
    
    assert_eq!(html, "<!doctype html><html>...</html>".to_string());
}

There are included examples with the most famous server frameworks and a default frontend react app made using npx create-react-app and the typescript --template flag. Check here the example ReactJS template.

Example with initial props

use ssr_rs::Ssr;
use std::fs::read_to_string;

fn main() {

    let props = r##"{
        "params": [
            "hello",
            "ciao",
            "こんにちは"
        ]
    }"##;

    let source = read_to_string("./path/to/build.js").unwrap();

    let mut js = Ssr::new(&source, "entryPoint").unwrap();

    let html = js.render_to_string(Some(&props)).unwrap();

    assert_eq!(html, "<!doctype html><html>...</html>".to_string());
}

Example with actix-web

Examples with different web frameworks are available in the examples folder.

Even though the V8 engine allows accessing the same isolate from different threads that is forbidden by this crate for two reasons:

rusty_v8 library have not implemented yet the V8 Locker API. Accessing Ssr struct from a different thread will make the V8 engine to panic.
Rendering HTML does not need shared state across threads.

For this reason parallel computation is a better choice. Following actix-web setup:

use actix_web::{get, http::StatusCode, App, HttpResponse, HttpServer};
use std::cell::RefCell;
use std::fs::read_to_string;

use ssr_rs::Ssr;

thread_local! {
    static SSR: RefCell<Ssr<'static, 'static>> = RefCell::new(
            Ssr::from(
                read_to_string("./client/dist/ssr/index.js").unwrap(),
                "SSR"
                ).unwrap()
            )
}

#[actix_web::main]
async fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {

    Ssr::create_platform();

    HttpServer::new(|| {
        App::new()
            .service(index)
    })
    .bind("127.0.0.1:8080")?
    .run()
    .await
}

#[get("/")]
async fn index() -> HttpResponse {
    let result = SSR.with(|ssr| ssr.borrow_mut().render_to_string(None).unwrap());

    HttpResponse::build(StatusCode::OK)
        .content_type("text/html; charset=utf-8")
        .body(result)
}

Contributing

Any helps or suggestions will be appreciated.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE_MIT || LICENSE_APACHE file for more information.