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AWS CodeBuild Pre-Renderer

The aim of this repo is to make it easy to deploy an AWS CodeBuild project that fetches a list of web pages and renders them as HTML, storing the resulting content in S3 for use by web servers.

This is useful for complex Single Page Apps (SPAs), servers that render different content in different environments, and in general as part of a pre-rendering pipeline for medium to large websites.

⚠WARNING⚠ Do not use this repo directly in CodeBuild, unless you point it to a specific commit, as the code is subject to change at any time and those changes may be breaking!

Usage

Options

Specify options using environment variables, either directly in your CodeBuild project for simple cases or via environmentVariablesOverride fields in the AWS CodeBuild SDK/CLI.

Required

  • SITEMAP_PATH (e.g. "https://www.bscotch.net/sitemap.xml")
    Either this or paths must be specified.
  • PATHS (CSV, e.g. "/,/about,/blog/post-1")
    Must be specified if SITEMAP_PATH is not. Must all be HTML files.

Optional

  • BLOCK_PATTERNS
    A CSV of patterns (will be converted using new RegExp(pattern)) to test against requested URLs. If any provided patterns match a URL, its request will be blocked. This is useful for features like telemetry and error reporting, that you may not want running during rendering.
  • BLOCK_HOSTS
    A CSV of host names (e.g. ads.example.com) for which all requests should be blocked.
  • DEBUG
    If true, debug info is logged to STDOUT for review. Useful for identifying caching and other issues.
  • OUT_FOLDER (e.g. "dev" or "dev/my-version")
    Files are output into a folder called "rendered". Optionally output into a subfolder.
  • HEADERS (CSV, e.g. "Authentication: Basic XYZ,My-Custom-Header: MyCustomHeaderValue")
  • WAIT_FOR_SELECTOR
    A CSS selector that, if specified, will cause the renderer to wait until an element matching that selector exists on the page.
  • WAIT_MILLISECONDS
    Number of milliseconds to wait after a page is retrieved, after WAIT_FOR_SELECTOR if set. Useful for pages that
  • MAX_SYNCHRONOUS (default 50)
    In effect, the number of tabs to open at once for rendering. The renderer will ensure that there are always this many pages being rendered at once.
  • INLINE_CSS
    If true, a CSS inliner will be run on the final HTML prior to writing to file. Style tags will be removed, but link tags pointing to stylesheets will be kept. External CSS will not be inlined.
  • COMPUTE_SCRIPT_HASHES
    If "true", compute SHA hashes for each script in each HTML file, saving to a .json file (contents: {scriptHashes:[]}) with the same name & path as the html file (just with .html replaced with .json). These can be used in your 'Content-Security-Policy' header to set strict Javascript rules while whitelisting your inline scripts.
  • GZIP
    If "true", gzip all files before writing, saving with the additional ".gz" extension.

Create a CodeBuild Project

  1. Go to the CodeBuild console
  2. Create a new project.
  • Project Configuration
    • Name it something descriptive.
  • Source
    • Make a fork of this project and point to that. Alernatively, point to a specific commit via the "additional options". Otherwise you risk an unexpected breaking change.
  • Environment
    • Select Ubuntu (Amazon Linux might also work, but it's untested)
    • Select the latest runtimes etc.
    • Create or choose a Service Role. You'll need to ensure it has the proper IAM permissions.
    • Set any of the above environment variables to specify how the renderer should behave.
  • Buildspec
    • Choose "Use a Buildspec file"
  • Artifacts
    • Choose "Amazon S3"
    • Choose your bucket (you may want to make a new one)
    • Set any other options that make sense for your deployment. Include a prefix if the S3 bucket is used for other things.
    • Consider adding S3 caching. This project depends on downloading a large (250+MB) Chrome executable. Not having to do that every time will probably speed things up!
  1. Make sure that your server will not send pre-rendered pages when the renderer is making the requests. Otherwise you won't be able to update your content. You can do this by having the server check for a header that you provide to the renderer.
  2. Make sure that your server has increased rate limits for your rendering requests.
  3. Ensure that either your server is serving up a sitemap, or that you can provide a list of URLs to the renderer.

Trigger the renderer

You can manually run the CodeBuild project to render your pages, or call it using the AWS command line tools, or (ideally) automate running the CodeBuild project as part of your deployment process. Set the default parameters in your CodeBuild project's Environment Variables, and optionally override them on a per-request basis.

Output

Output will end up in S3, with exact details depending on your "Artifacts" settings in the CodeBuild project.

Note that the paths to your files will all start with "rendered/", plus whatever you provided for OUT_FOLDER.

For URLs that do not have have the .html suffix, the output file will be an index.html file in a folder by the original name. For example:

  • / → ./rendered[/OUT_FOLDER]/index.html
  • /blog → ./rendered[/OUT_FOLDER]/blog/index.html
  • /blog.html → ./rendered[/OUT_FOLDER]/blog.html