Laravel Prerender

Laravel middleware for prerendering javascript-rendered pages on the fly for SEO

jeroennoten
282
59
PHP

For Laravel 4, use the 1.0 branch

Laravel Prerender Build Status

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Bing are constantly trying to view your website… but they don’t execute javascript. That’s why Prerender was built. Prerender is perfect for AngularJS SEO, BackboneJS SEO, EmberJS SEO, and any other javascript framework.

This middleware intercepts requests to your Laravel website or application from crawlers, and then makes a call to the (external) Prerender Service to get the static HTML instead of the javascript for that page.

Prerender adheres to google’s _escaped_fragment_ proposal, which we recommend you use. It’s easy:

  • Just add <meta name="fragment" content="!"> to the <head> of all of your pages
  • If you use hash urls (#), change them to the hash-bang (#!), but you can also use HTML5’s push-state
  • That’s it! Perfect SEO on javascript pages.

Installation

Require this package run: composer require nutsweb/laravel-prerender

After installing, add the ServiceProvider to the providers array in config/app.php.

'Nutsweb\LaravelPrerender\LaravelPrerenderServiceProvider',

If you want to make use of the prerender.io service, add the following to your .env file:

PRERENDER_TOKEN=yoursecrettoken

If you are using a self-hosted service, add the server address in the .env file.

PRERENDER_URL=http://example.com

You can disable the service by adding the following to your .env file:

PRERENDER_ENABLE=false

This may be useful for your local development environment.

How it works

  1. The middleware checks to make sure we should show a prerendered page
    1. The middleware checks if the request is from a crawler (_escaped_fragment_ or agent string)
    2. The middleware checks to make sure we aren’t requesting a resource (js, css, etc…)
    3. (optional) The middleware checks to make sure the url is in the whitelist
    4. (optional) The middleware checks to make sure the url isn’t in the blacklist
  2. The middleware makes a GET request to the prerender service (phantomjs server) for the page’s prerendered HTML
  3. Return that HTML to the crawler

Customization

To customize the whitelist and the blacklist, you first have to publish the configuration file:

$ php artisan vendor:publish

Whitelist

Whitelist paths or patterns. You can use asterix syntax.
If a whitelist is supplied, only url’s containing a whitelist path will be prerendered.
An empty array means that all URIs will pass this filter.
Note that this is the full request URI, so including starting slash and query parameter string.

// prerender.php:
'whitelist' => [
    '/frontend/*' // only prerender pages starting with '/frontend/'
],

Blacklist

Blacklist paths to exclude. You can use asterix syntax.
If a blacklist is supplied, all url’s will be prerendered except ones containing a blacklist path.
By default, a set of asset extentions are included (this is actually only necessary when you dynamically provide assets via routes).
Note that this is the full request URI, so including starting slash and query parameter string.

// prerender.php:
'blacklist' => [
    '/api/*' // do not prerender pages starting with '/api/'
],

Contributing

I love any contributions! Feel free to create issues or pull requests.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright © 2014 Jeroen Noten

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.