grunt-html-snapshot

Makes it easy to provide html snapshots for client side applications so that they can be indexed by web crawlers

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.0

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-html-snapshot --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-html-snapshot');

htmlSnapshot task

Run this task with the grunt htmlSnapshot command.

configuring the htmlSnapshot task

    grunt.initConfig({
        htmlSnapshot: {
            all: {
              options: {
                //that's the path where the snapshots should be placed
                //it's empty by default which means they will go into the directory
                //where your Gruntfile.js is placed
                snapshotPath: 'snapshots/',
                //This should be either the base path to your index.html file
                //or your base URL. Currently the task does not use it's own
                //webserver. So if your site needs a webserver to be fully
                //functional configure it here.
                sitePath: 'http://localhost:8888/my-website/',
                //you can choose a prefix for your snapshots
                //by default it's 'snapshot_'
                fileNamePrefix: 'sp_',
                //by default the task waits 500ms before fetching the html.
                //this is to give the page enough time to to assemble itself.
                //if your page needs more time, tweak here.
                msWaitForPages: 1000,
                //sanitize function to be used for filenames. Converts '#!/' to '_' as default
                //has a filename argument, must have a return that is a sanitized string
                sanitize: function (requestUri) {
                    //returns 'index.html' if the url is '/', otherwise a prefix
                    if (/\/$/.test(requestUri)) {
                      return 'index.html';
                    } else {
                      return requestUri.replace(/\//g, 'prefix-');
                    }
                },
                //if you would rather not keep the script tags in the html snapshots
                //set `removeScripts` to true. It's false by default
                removeScripts: true,
                //set `removeLinkTags` to true. It's false by default
                removeLinkTags: true,
                //set `removeMetaTags` to true. It's false by default
                removeMetaTags: true,
                //Replace arbitrary parts of the html
                replaceStrings:[
                    {'this': 'will get replaced by this'},
                    {'/old/path/': '/new/path'}
                ],
                // allow to add a custom attribute to the body
                bodyAttr: 'data-prerendered',
                //here goes the list of all urls that should be fetched
                urls: [
                  '',
                  '#!/en-gb/showcase'
                ],
                // a list of cookies to be put into the phantomjs cookies jar for the visited page
                cookies: [
                  {"path": "/", "domain": "localhost", "name": "lang", "value": "en-gb"}
                ]
              }
            }
        }
    });

Release History

• 0.6.1 - trigger warnings with grunt.warn(msg, 6) instead of grunt.log(msg)
• 0.6.0 - Provide a function hook for the file name sanitization (by @mrgamer)
• 0.5.0 - Add option to set cookies. Also fixed a bug for scenarios where multiple instances of the tasks are being used in parallel.
• 0.4.0 - Add more sophisticated replace functionality to transform the html output (thanks to @okcoker)
• 0.3.0 - Escape tabs & introduced new option bodyAttr to place a custom attribute on the body
• 0.2.1 - fixed a bug where quotes where missing from the html
• 0.2.0 - added option to remove script tags from the output
• 0.1.0 - Initial release