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🪄 Renderers

Astro is designed to support your favorite UI frameworks. React, Svelte, Vue, and Preact are all built-in to Astro and supported out of the box. No configuration is needed to enable these.

Internally, each framework is supported via a framework renderer. A renderer is a type of Astro plugin that adds support for a framework. Some are built-in, but you can also provide your own third-party renderers to add Astro support for new frameworks.

What is a renderer?

A renderer is an NPM package that has two responsiblities:

  1. render a component to a static string of HTML at build time
  2. rehydrate that HTML to create an interactive component on the client.

Take a look at any one of Astro's built-in renderers to see this in action. We'll go into more detail in the following sections.

Add a renderer to Astro

Astro enables a few popular framework renderers by default. If you want to add a new renderer to your project, you first need to set the built-in renderers that you care about.

// astro.config.js
export default {
  renderers: [
    // Add the framework renderers that you want to enable for your project.
    // If you set an empty array here, no UI frameworks will work.
    //  '@astrojs/renderer-svelte',
    //  '@astrojs/renderer-vue',
    //  '@astrojs/renderer-react',
    //  '@astrojs/renderer-preact',
  ],
};

To add a new custom renderer, install the npm package dependency in your project and then update the renderers array to include it:

// astro.config.js
export default {
  renderers: ['my-custom-renderer', '@astrojs/renderer-svelte', '@astrojs/renderer-vue', '@astrojs/renderer-react', '@astrojs/renderer-preact'],
};

Managing Framework Versions

In Astro, the renderer plugin defines which version of your framework to use with Astro. This should be set to as wide of a range as possible, but often will be pinned to a specific major version:

This is required because the renderer itself also uses these packages and requires a specific API to work. For example, If the user updated from Vue 2 to Vue 3 (or vice versa) then the renderer itself would break since the vue package would have changed.

What if I want to use a beta framework (ex: react@next)? Check to see if the renderer has a @next version that you could manually install and use. If one doesn't exist, feel free to request it: https://github.com/snowpackjs/astro/issues/new/choose

What if I need to override the framework version in my project? You can use the "resolutions" feature of many npm package managers to override or pin the framework version for your entire project. Just be sure to select a version that is compatible with your renderer:

Building Your Own Renderer

Building a renderer? We'd love for you to contribute renderers for popular frameworks back to the Astro repo. Feel free to open an issue or pull request to discuss.

A simple renderer only needs a few files:

/my-custom-renderer/
├── package.json
├── index.js
├── server.js
└── client.js

Package Manifest (package.json)

A renderer should include any framework dependencies as package dependencies. For example, @astrojs/renderer-react includes react & react-dom as dependencies in the package.json manifest.

// package.json
"name": "@astrojs/renderer-react",
"dependencies": {
  "react": "^17.0.0",
  "react-dom": "^17.0.0"
}

This means that Astro users don't need to install the UI framework packages themselves. The renderer is the only package that your users will need to install.

Renderer Entrypoint (index.js)

The main entrypoint of a renderer is a simple JS file which exports a manifest for the renderer. The required values are name, server, and client.

Additionally, this entrypoint can define a Snowpack plugin that should be used to load non-JavaScript files.

export default {
  name: '@astrojs/renderer-xxx', // the renderer name
  client: './client.js', // relative path to the client entrypoint
  server: './server.js', // relative path to the server entrypoint
  snowpackPlugin: '@snowpack/plugin-xxx', // optional, the name of a snowpack plugin to inject
  snowpackPluginOptions: { example: true }, // optional, any options to be forwarded to the snowpack plugin
};

Server Entrypoint (server.js)

The server entrypoint of a renderer is responsible for checking if a component should use this renderer, and if so, how that component should be rendered to a string of static HTML.

export default {
  // should Component use this renderer?
  check(Component, props, childHTML) {},
  // Component => string of static HTML
  renderToStaticMarkup(Component, props, childHTML) {},
};

check

check is a function that determines whether a Component should be "claimed" by this renderer.

In it's simplest form, it can check for the existence of a flag on Object-based components.

function check(Component) {
  return Component.isMyFrameworkComponent;
}

In more complex scenarios, like when a Component is a Function without any flags, you may need to use try/catch to attempt a full render. This result is cached so that it only runs once per-component.

function check(Component, props, childHTML) {
  try {
    const { html } = renderToStaticMarkup(Component, props, childHTML);
    return Boolean(html);
  } catch (e) {}
  return false;
}

renderToStaticMarkup

renderToStaticMarkup is a function that renders a Component to a static string of HTML. There's usually a method exported by frameworks named something like renderToString.

import { renderToString } from 'xxx';

function renderToStaticMarkup(Component, props, childHTML) {
  const html = renderToString(h(Component, { ...props, innerHTML: childHTML }));
  return { html };
}

Note that childHTML is an HTML string representing this component's children. If your framework does not support rendering HTML directly, you are welcome to use a wrapper component. By convention, Astro uses the astro-fragment custom element to inject childHTML into. Your renderer should use that, too.

import { h, renderToString } from 'xxx';

const Wrapper = ({ value }) => h('astro-fragment', { dangerouslySetInnerHTML: { __html: value } });

function renderToStaticMarkup(Component, props, childHTML) {
  const html = renderToString(h(Component, props, h(Wrapper, { value: childHTML })));
  return { html };
}

Client Entrypoint (client.js)

The client entrypoint of a renderer is responsible for rehydrating static HTML (the result of renderToStaticMarkup) back into a fully interactive component. Its default export should be a function which accepts the host element of the Component, an astro-root custom element.

If your framework supports non-destructive component hydration (as opposed to a destructive render method), be sure to use that! Following your framework's Server Side Rendering (SSR) guide should point you in the right direction.

import { hydrate } from 'xxx';

export default (element) => {
  return (Component, props, childHTML) => {
    hydrate(h(Component, { ...props, innerHTML: childHTML }), element);
  };
};

Note that childHTML is an HTML string representing this component's children. If your framework does not support rendering HTML directly, you should use the same wrapper component you used for the server entrypoint.

import { h, hydrate } from 'xxx';
import SharedWrapper from './SharedWrapper.js';

export default (element) => {
  return (Component, props, childHTML) => {
    hydrate(h(Component, props, h(SharedWrapper, { value: childHTML })), element);
  };
};