Relaks Harvest

Relaks Harvest enables server-side rendering (SSR) of a React application that uses Relaks. It takes a ReactElement (or Preact VNode) and recursively renders all sub-components. When it encounters a Relaks component, it calls renderAsync() and waits for the returned promise to fulfill. The end result is a tree of ReactElements (or VNode) that are are all simple HTML tags, which can then be given to ReactDOMServer.renderToString() (or preact-render-to-string).

Relaks Harvest is designed to run on both the server-side and the client-side. On the server-side, it's used to generate the HTML that a visitor will see initially. On the client-side, it's used to trigger pre-caching of data prior to the switch to client-side rendering (while the visitor is looking at the server-generated contents). Provided that the same code is used for in both situations, the state of the client will sync up perfectly, yielding a seamless transition from SSR to CSR.

For an example on how to use Relaks Harvest, please look at relaks-starwars-example-isomorphic.

Install

npm --save-dev install relaks-harvest

Usage

React:

import { harvest } from 'relaks-harvest';
import { renderToString } from 'react-dom/server';
 
let appElement = <Application />;
let appHTMLElement = async harvest(appElement);
let appHTML = ReactDOMServer.renderToString(appHTMLElement);

Preact:

import { harvest } from 'relaks-harvest/preact';
import { render } from 'preact-render-to-string';
 
let appElement = <Application />;
let appHTMLElement = async harvest(appElement);
let appHTML = render(appHTMLElement);