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Server Side Rendering with Vue and Express

May 5, 2019

Vue has solid support for server-side rendering in Node.js. This means that, given a Vue app, you can render the app in an Express endpoint using the vue-server-renderer library.

Below is an example of rendering a Vue app using Express.

const { renderToString } = require('vue-server-renderer').createRenderer();
const expressApp = require('express')();

expressApp.get('*', (req, res) => {
  const app = new Vue({
    // Initialize with data from the request.
    data: { content: req.query.content },
    template: '<div>{{content}}</div>'
  });
  renderToString(app).
    // Sends '<div data-server-rendered="true">Hello, World</div>'
    then(html => res.send(html)).
    catch(err => res.status(500).send(err.stack));
});

const server = await expressApp.listen(3000);

Note that the renderToString() function returns a promise. Make sure you handle errors.

Notice that the above div has a data-server-rendered attribute. The data-server-rendered attribute marks this div for client-side hydration. In other words, you can then use the $mount() function to make your Vue client pick up your static HTML and start reacting to client-side events.

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