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Hydrate App

The hydrate app is a bundle of your same components, but compiled so they can be hydrated on a NodeJS server, and generate HTML. This is the same NodeJS app which prerendering uses internally, and the same one which Angular Universal SSR uses for Ionic. Like Stencil components, the hydrate app itself is not restricted to one framework.

Note that Stencil does NOT use Puppeteer for SSR or prerendering.

How to Use the Hydrate App

Server side rendering (SSR) can be accomplished in a similar way to prerendering. Instead of using the --prerender CLI flag, you can add { type: 'dist-hydrate-script' } to your stencil.config.js. This will generate a hydrate app in your root project directory that can be imported and used by your Node server.

After publishing your component library, you can import the hydrate app into your server's code like this:

import { hydrateDocument } from 'yourpackage/hydrate';

The app comes with two functions, hydrateDocument and renderToString. An advantage to hydrateDocument is that it can take an existing document which was already parsed. The renderToString function instead inputs a raw html string, and does the parsing to a document.

hydrateDocument: You can use hydrateDocument as a part of your server's response logic before serving the web page. hydrateDocument takes two arguments, a document and a config object. The function returns a promise with the hydrated results. The resulting html can be parsed from the html property in the returned results.

Example taken from Ionic Angular server

import { hydrateDocument } from 'yourpackage/hydrate';

export function hydrateComponents(doc) {
  return hydrateDocument(doc)
    .then((hydrateResults) => {
      // execute logic based on results
      console.log(hydrateResults.html);
      return hydrateResults;
    });
}

hydrateDocument Options

  • canonicalUrl - string
  • constrainTimeouts - boolean
  • clientHydrateAnnotations - boolean
  • cookie - string
  • direction - string
  • language - string
  • maxHydrateCount - number
  • referrer - string
  • removeScripts - boolean
  • removeUnusedStyles - boolean
  • resourcesUrl - string
  • timeout - number
  • title - string
  • url - string
  • userAgent - string

renderToString: The hydrate app also has a renderToString function that allows you to pass in an html string that also returns a promise of HydrateResults. The second parameter is a config object that can alter the output of the markup. Like hydrateDocument, the resulting string can be parsed from the html property.

Example taken from Ionic Core

const results = await hydrate.renderToString(srcHtml, {
  prettyHtml: true,
  removeScripts: true
});

console.log(results.html);

renderToString Options

  • approximateLineWidth - number
  • prettyHtml - boolean
  • removeAttributeQuotes - boolean
  • removeBooleanAttributeQuotes - boolean
  • removeEmptyAttributes - boolean
  • removeHtmlComments - boolean
  • afterHydrate - boolean
  • beforeHydrate - boolean
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