Pre-render API

Endpoint: service.headless-render-api.com

Pre-render/server-side render Path: /$URL

Example URL: 

https://service.headless-render-api.com/https://example.com/

The target $URL is obviously part of the path, but do not re-encode or re-escape it beyond what you'd enter into a browser URL field. Both UTF-8 encoding and percent-encoding are acceptable.

Related links:

This document describes the pre-rendering functionality/endpoint, its associated HTTP header options, and possible error responses.

See the following links for related information:

• examples of using the API
• prerendercloud-server for using this API through our pre-configured pushstate server (available as Node.js npm package or Docker)
  • npx prerendercloud-server
  • docker run prerendercloud/webserver
• other clients
  • Node.js client for using this API via node/express http middleware (also what powers prerendercloud-server)
    • app.use(require("prerendercloud"))
  • /.well-known/open-api.yaml for OpenAPI/Swagger
  • /.well-known/ai-plugin.json for LLMs like ChatGPT

You can think of this endpoint almost like a proxy, and in some ways a scraper. It returns the serialized HTML of the requested URL (the "origin") - useful for converting JavaScript apps to their JavaScript + HTML representation instead of just JavaScript.

All of our integration libraries (Node, Nginx, Apache etc.) proxy your requests through this endpoint. It can also be used as a conventional API - but if used as a conventional API, be mindful that the default options are designed to favor it as a proxy endpoint (caches, doesn't follow redirects, includes some server-side rendering compatibility add-ons)

curl https://service.headless-render-api.com/https://example.com/ > out.html

// 1. build/compile your JavaScript single-page app
// 2. cd into your build/dist directory

npx prerendercloud-server

// npm install prerendercloud
const app = require('express')();
const prerendercloud = require('prerendercloud');

app.use(prerendercloud);

See more low-level examples, or see high-level pre-rendering docs.