Prerendering your Universal application

Prerendering a Universal application allows us to generate the HTML before the user requests it; increasing performance and decreasing cost. Let's configure your application to prerender and staticly serve it's most commonly accessed routes on Firebase Hosting.

First create a static.paths.js in your project root, which lists the URLs you'd want to prerender:

export default [
    '/',
    '/another_path',
    '/yet_another_path'
];

Let's install mkdir-recursive to make the next step a little easier:

npm i --save-dev mkdir-recursive

Now replace the listener in your server.ts with the following:

import { readFileSync, writeFileSync, existsSync } from 'fs';
import { renderModuleFactory } from '@angular/platform-server';
import { mkdirSync } from 'mkdir-recursive';

if (process.env.PRERENDER) {

    const routes = require('./static.paths').default;
    Promise.all(
        routes.map(route =>
            renderModuleFactory(AppServerModuleNgFactory, {
                document: template,
                url: route,
                extraProviders: [
                    provideModuleMap(LAZY_MODULE_MAP)
                ]
            }).then(html => [route, html])
        )
    ).then(results => {
        results.forEach(([route, html]) => {
            const fullPath = join('./public', route);
            if (!existsSync(fullPath)) { mkdirSync(fullPath); }
            writeFileSync(join(fullPath, 'index.html'), html);
        });
        process.exit();
    });

} else if (!process.env.FUNCTION_NAME) {

    // If we're not in the Cloud Functions environment, spin up a Node server
    const PORT = process.env.PORT || 4000;
    app.listen(PORT, () => {
        console.log(`Node server listening on http://localhost:${PORT}`);
    });
}

Now if the PRERENDER environment variable is passed any value, instead of serving your application it will iterate over the paths in static.paths.js, render them, and write them to your public directory. You could always make this a seperate script.

Finally make some modifications to your package.json, to prerender your content when you build:

"scripts": {
  // ... omitted
  "build": "ng build && npm run copy:hosting && npm run build:functions && npm run prerender:ssr",
  "prerender:ssr": "PRERENDER=1 node dist/YOUR_PROJECT_NAME-webpack/server.js",
},

Now when you run npm run build the prerendered content should be available in your /public directory, ready for deployment on Firebase Hosting.