Almost SSR - Nuxt

Demo application with authorized server-side and client-side rendering.

👀 Looking for Different Framework?

• 🔦 Svelte Kit | svelte-kit.ssr.almostapps.eu
• 🔦 Next.js | next-js.ssr.almostapps.eu
• 🔦 Astro | astro.ssr.almostapps.eu
• 🔦 Qwik | qwik.ssr.almostapps.eu
• 🔦 Remix | remix.ssr.almostapps.eu

💭 So How Does It Work?

Appwrite uses 1st party secure cookies for authorization. For legacy reasons, there are two such cookies. They are both very similar, but one’s name ends with _legacy and is configured a tiny bit differently. It’s also possible to use a fallback cookie, but that is not secure for production, and we will not be using that.

To ensure server-side rendering works, we need to set those cookies on our SSR server hostname instead of the Appwrite hostname. Let’s say our Appwrite instance is on cloud.appwrite.io, and our app is on myapp.com. SSR server on domain myapp.com won’t receive appwrite.io cookies. This is expected behavior, as browsers keep 1st party cookies securely scoped to specific domains.

To set those cookies on the SSR server, we need a special API endpoint in our SSR server. This endpoint will send a request to create a session, proxying email/password or other credentials. This endpoint next parses the response set-cookie header, replaces domain configuration on the cookies, and set’s it’s own set-cookie on the response to the client.

When a client calls this endpoint, the cookie will now be set on the SSR server hostname instead of the Appwrite hostname.

This makes server-side rendering work, but now client-side rendering is broken. Since set-cookie coming to the browser only includes a cookie for the SSR server, talking to the Appwrite server directly won’t have a proper cookie - there is no auth cookie on the Appwrite hostname. To overcome this problem, we ensure the Appwrite hostname is a subdomain of the SSR hostname. For example, if our SSR server runs on myapp.com, Appwrite needs a custom domain configured on appwrite.myapp.com. With this setup, all requests to the Appwrite server will include auth cookies, and the user will be properly authorized. This is possible thanks to Appwrite prefixing the cookie domain with ., meaning all subdomains can also access the cookie.

🧰 Tech Stack

• Appwrite
• Nuxt
• Pink Design

🛠️ Setup Server

1. Setup Appwrite server
2. Create project almostSsr

👀 Setup Client

1. Install libarries npm install
2. Update AppwriteEndpoint in nuxt.config.js
3. Start server npm run dev

🚀 Deployment

1. Deploy the frontend on your production domain. For example, myapp.com.
2. Add the frontend domain as a trusted platform in your Appwrite project.
3. Add a custom domain to your Appwrite project, which is a subdomain of your frontend. For example, appwrite.myapp.com.
4. Update SsrHostname and AppwriteHostname in nuxt.config.js with proper domains.

🤝 Contributing

To contribute to frontend, make sure to use the Pink Design design system. Ensure both dark and light theme work properly, as well as responsivity on mobile, tablet and desktop.

When contributing with static files, ensure all images are in WEBP or SVG format.

🖼️ Screenshots

🤖 Auto-generated documentation

Look at the Nuxt 3 documentation to learn more.

Setup

Make sure to install the dependencies:

# yarn
yarn install

# npm
npm install

# pnpm
pnpm install

Development Server

Start the development server on http://localhost:3000

npm run dev

Production

Build the application for production:

npm run build

Locally preview production build:

npm run preview

Check out the deployment documentation for more information.