Alright, so I wanted to get server-side rendering (SSR) working with *. It’s supposed to make things faster, you know, better initial load times and all that. I’d been putting it off, but figured it was time to bite the bullet.
First, I dug into the Inertia documentation. Honestly, it felt a little overwhelming at first. There’s all this talk about setting up a separate * server, and I was like, “Whoa, do I really need all that?” But I kept reading, trying to piece it all together.
I started by installing the necessary packages. I think it was @inertiajs/server or something like that. Gotta make sure you get the right ones, otherwise, it’s just a recipe for disaster. I’ve learned that the hard way, believe me.
Then came the fun part – setting up the actual SSR server. I created a new file, I think I called it , and started following the instructions. It involved a bunch of require statements and some configuration stuff. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what half of it did, but I figured I’d just roll with it and see what happened.
Trying It Out
I get to do the following steps.
- I installed the Inertia SSR package.
- I built my application for SSR.
- I started the SSR server.
Once I had the server running, I needed to update my main application to actually use it. This involved changing how Inertia was initialized. I remember having to mess around with the resolve function and add some conditional logic to check if we were running on the server or in the browser. It was a bit of a head-scratcher, but I eventually got it working.
I fired up my app, and… boom! It worked! Well, sort of. The initial load was definitely faster, which was awesome. But I noticed some weirdness with some of my components. They weren’t rendering quite right on the server, and I had to do some digging to figure out why.
Turns out, some of my components were relying on browser-specific APIs, like window or document. Those don’t exist on the server, so I had to add some checks to make sure they only ran in the browser. It was a bit of a pain, but hey, that’s the life of a developer, right?
After a few more tweaks and some head-scratching, I finally got everything working smoothly. The initial load was blazing fast, and all my components were rendering correctly. It was a bit of a journey, but definitely worth it in the end. If you’re thinking about using Inertia SSR, I’d say go for it! Just be prepared for a little bit of a learning curve.
