Scully VS rendertron

In recent years, projects like Vercel's NextJS and Gatsby have garnered acclaim and higher and higher usage numbers. Not only that, but their core concepts of Server Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG) have been seen in other projects and frameworks such as Angular Universal, ScullyIO, and NuxtJS. Why is that? What is SSR and SSG? How can I use these concepts in my applications?

I just spent like 4 hours trying to resolve some dependencies in my angular project so I can install skully - a static site generator in my angular project. And I am exhausted.

There are several solutions to get around the routing issue. One is to use MPA's (multi page applications). Both Angular (Angular Universal, Scully, and more recently released Analog) and React (NextJs and Remix) have meta-frameworks that provide a server side rendered solution.

Unfortunately, there are no options that I know of. There is a new meta-framework for Angular called Analog but it is not yet ready for SSR. If you need SSG, there is Scully. Other than that, you will have to wait for the Angular Team to fix their Universal project or switch to one of the meta-frameworks :)

Make sure to checkout the Scully Docs.

As for Angular, there's the official @angular/universal package, but I wasn't a fan of it the last time I used it. I've used Scully before and it worked great, plus it requires no changes to your code, unlike Universal.

Scully, static site generation

Take a look at Scully. It’s a static site generator for Angular apps.

Maybe take a look at this: https://scully.io/

Rendertron is deprecated

Please note that this project is deprecated. Dynamic rendering is not a recommended approach and there are better approaches to rendering on the web.

Rendertron will not be actively maintained at this point.

https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron

GoogleChrome/Rendertron proxy https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron.

Are you worried that rendertron isn't being maintained? (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron/issues/865 and https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron/issues/801) Have you thought about using anything else or doing it yourself with Puppeteer or Playwright?

Rendertron, quite old now.

Googlebot: SSR a non-responsive mobile version only for the Googlebot User Agent, to get SEO. But do Client-Side Rendering (CSR) for users, to get full responsivity. Could be done with manual user-agent sniffing, or with a GoogleChrome/Rendertron proxy. Though Google may not like being fed something different than users (different initial markup, even though resulting markup after React’s first CSR should be the same). But it might be problematic long-term to SSR only for the Googlebot, since it’s effectively serving the Googlebot something else than what the users get.. Google might crack down on it, since it could be abused.

This might be another one: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron (not sure if it does everything that prerender does or not).

Still prefer CRA with Dynamic Rendering with rendertron over Next.js and Gatsby...

A demo Rendertron service is available at https://render-tron.appspot.com/. It is not designed to be used as a production endpoint. You can use it, but there are no uptime guarantees.