v3-docs/docs/packages/webapp.md
The webapp package is what lets your Meteor app serve content to a web
browser. It is included in the meteor-base set of packages that is
automatically added when you run meteor create. You can easily build a
Meteor app without it - for example if you wanted to make a command-line
tool that still used the Meteor package system and DDP.
This package also allows you to add handlers for HTTP requests. This lets other services access your app's data through an HTTP API, allowing it to easily interoperate with tools and frameworks that don't yet support DDP.
webapp exposes the express API for
handling requests through WebApp.handlers.
Here's an example that will let you handle a specific URL:
// Listen to incoming HTTP requests (can only be used on the server).
WebApp.handlers.use("/hello", (req, res, next) => {
res.writeHead(200);
res.end(`Hello world from: ${Meteor.release}`);
});
One of the really cool things you can do with WebApp is serve static HTML for a landing page where TTFB (time to first byte) is of utmost importance.
The Bundle Visualizer and Dynamic Imports are great tools to help you minimize initial page load times. But sometimes you just need to skinny down your initial page load to bare metal.
The good news is that WebApp makes this is really easy to do.
Step one is to create a your static HTML file and place it in the private folder at the root of your application.
Here's a sample index.html you might use to get started:
::: code-group
<head>
<title>Fast Landing Page</title>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0 user-scalable=no" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="path to your style sheet etc">
</head>
<body>
<!-- your content -->
</body>
<script>
// any functions you need to support your landing page
</script>
</html>
/* global WebApp Assets */
import crypto from "crypto";
import express from "express";
const router = express.Router();
router.get("/", async function (req, res, next) {
const buf = await Assets.getTextAsync("index.html");
if (buf.length > 0) {
const eTag = crypto.createHash("md5").update(buf).digest("hex");
if (req.headers["if-none-match"] === eTag) {
res.writeHead(304, "Not Modified");
return res.end();
}
res.writeHead(200, {
ETag: eTag,
"Content-Type": "text/html",
});
return res.end(buf);
}
return res.end("<html><body>Index page not found!</body></html>");
});
WebApp.handlers.use(router);
::: There are a couple things to think about with this approach.
We're reading the contents of index.html using the Assets module that makes it really easy to read files out of the private root folder.
We're using the connect-route NPM package to simplify WebApp route processing. But you can use any package you want to understand what is being requested.
And finally, if you decide to use this technique you'll want to make sure you understand how conflicting client side routing will affect user experience.
Experimental: Disable Boilerplate Response (PR#13855)
Meteor 3.4 introduces an experimental configuration option to improve React Server-Side Rendering (SSR) performance by disabling the default boilerplate HTML response.
When using React SSR with packages like server-render, you may want to completely control the HTML output without Meteor's default boilerplate injection. Enable this with:
// server/main.js
import { WebApp } from 'meteor/webapp';
WebApp.addHtmlAttributeHook(() => ({
disableBoilerplateResponse: true
}));
Benefits:
Use Cases:
Important Notes:
server-render package for full SSR implementationsExample with server-render:
import { onPageLoad } from 'meteor/server-render';
import { renderToString } from 'react-dom/server';
import { WebApp } from 'meteor/webapp';
WebApp.addHtmlAttributeHook(() => ({
disableBoilerplateResponse: true
}));
onPageLoad(sink => {
const html = renderToString(<App />);
sink.renderIntoElementById('root', html);
sink.appendToHead('<link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles.css">');
sink.appendToBody('<script src="/client.js"></script>');
});
In some cases it is valuable to be able to control the meteor_runtime_config variable that initializes Meteor at runtime.
There are occasions when a single Meteor server would like to serve multiple cordova applications that each have a unique ROOT_URL. But there are 2 problems:
ROOT_URL.cordova applications are build time configured with a specific ROOT_URL.These 2 conditions break autoupdate for the cordova applications. cordova-plugin-meteor-webapp will fail the update if the ROOT_URL from the server does not match the build time configured ROOT_URL of the cordova application.
To remedy this problem webapp has a hook for dynamically configuring __meteor_runtime_config__ on the server.
WebApp.addRuntimeConfigHook(
({ arch, request, encodedCurrentConfig, updated }) => {
// check the request to see if this is a request that requires
// modifying the runtime configuration
if (request.headers.domain === "calling.domain") {
// make changes to the config for this domain
// decode the current runtime config string into an object
const config = WebApp.decodeRuntimeConfig(current);
// make your changes
config.newVar = "some value";
config.oldVar = "new value";
// encode the modified object to the runtime config string
// and return it
return WebApp.encodeRuntimeConfig(config);
}
// Not modifying other domains so return undefined
return undefined;
}
);
Additionally, 2 helper functions are available to decode the runtime config string and encode the runtime config object.
<ApiBox name="WebApp.decodeRuntimeConfig"/> <ApiBox name="WebApp.encodeRuntimeConfig"/>const autoupdateCache;
// Get a notification when the runtime configuration is updated
// for each arch
WebApp.addUpdatedNotifyHook(({arch, manifest, runtimeConfig}) => {
// Example, see if runtimeConfig.autoupdate has changed and if so
// do something
if(!_.isEqual(autoupdateCache, runtimeConfig.autoupdate)) {
autoupdateCache = runtimeConfig.autoupdate;
// do something...
}
})