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I want to respond to Firebase events to generate (keep updated) to generate HTML pages and put them to Firebase Hosting so that they can be immediately available for use. I have it working except for the part about uploading the resulting HTML to Firebase hosting. It seems like I cannot do it this way but I want to so that all the pages are pre-rendered and ready to load fast.
I have cloud functions connected to hosting but that is the same old way of fetching from the database during a request cycle which I wanted to avoid.
On this page it says “Prerender your single-page apps to improve SEO.” and thats what I want. Is it possible? How to store the pre-rendered pages from a HTTP function?
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Answers
The “Prerender your single-page apps to improve SEO.” talked about on that page is prerender in the cloud before serving the content to the requesting party. It is not generate static files when data updates before a request is even made.Generally the prerendering with appropriate caching headers is enough for most use-cases.
If you really want to pregenerate all the pages whenever data changes, you could do that but that’ll be more complicated. There are some good articles and guides about deploying to Firebase Hosting after continuous integration finishes. The general idea holds true for what it sounds like you want except what triggers the build/deploy is data driven rather than code change.
The way to pre-render HTML so that metadata such as JSON-LD is available to search engines and opengraph is available to social media platforms for rich cards in shared links is to use Cloud Functions. You basically run Express/Pug (previously Jade) in your cloud function(s) to respond with HTML after whatever database/datastore lookups have completed. I’ve implemented this and it works great.
Call functions via HTTP requests provides some direction. You basically add some forwarding info to customize your hosting. This will direct HTTP calls over to your Express server running in Cloud Functions. Check the firebase functions github repo for sample code.