Building and Running Server-Side Rendering

Building

To simply build the Intershop PWA in server-side rendering mode, you can use the package.json script npm run build, which builds the Intershop PWA with the production configuration of the angular.json with the default theme.
Afterwards you can start the application with npm run serve (or do both by using npm run start).

To build a specific theme (see Guide - Multiple Themes), you can build (and run) via npm using the --configuration= argument.
All configuration options must be in the format --configuration=<theme>,(production|development).

Building Multiple Themes

The package.json property config.active-themes determines which themes should be built when running npm run build:multi.
This will build server and client bundles for all active themes and supply them in the dist folder.
The SSR process for each theme can be run individually using the generated scripts dist/<theme>/run-standalone.

To run multiple themes with PM2 the script dist/build-ecosystem can be used to generate the ecosystem.
If only one theme is active, the theme-specific SSR process will be run in cluster mode on the default port.
If more themes are active, PM2 is provisioned to run a distributor process in front of all theme-specific processes, to direct incoming traffic to the correct SSR process.

The preferred way for production deployments is to build the Dockerfile in the project root and run the created image.
This will automatically build all active themes and configure PM2 for running multiple themes in parallel.

Running

Overwriting configurations of the PWA is entirely done by environment variables.
This approach was chosen to have the best possible compatibility when running the PWA either from the command line or in an orchestrator.

To set environment variables in windows run for example set SSR_HYBRID=true on the command line before executing the npm run commands.

If the format is any, then the environment variable has to be set to any value to be active.
Setting it to "false" still counts as active.
Only empty strings count as inactive.

If the format is switch, the property is switched on by supplying on, 1, yes or true (checked case-insensitive), anything else is considered off.

All parameters are case sensitive.
Make sure to use them as written in the table below.

Running with https

We deliver a self-signed x509 certificate for local development/deployment purposes only.
For obvious reasons (e.g we do not know your hostname) we cannot deliver a certificate that is accepted by web browsers.
Therefore be prepared for security questions when first accessing the site.

Our image build process is expecting files server.crt and server.key in folder dist.
Extension crt is the certificate and key represents the private key.

Local ICM Cache

As there are multiple calls that are always common for any SSR requests (like retrieving /configurations, /localizations and category trees), those calls can be cached for a short time inside the PWA SSR process and be reused for multiple pre-renders.
Set CACHE_ICM_CALLS=recommended to setup basic short-time caching for the aforementioned calls.

You can further customize the caching by supplying a JSON structure to the CACHE_ICM_CALLS environment variable of the PWA SSR process:

{
  "/configurations": "20m",
  "/variations": "2h",
  ".*": "2m"
}

This example will cache /configurations for 20 Minutes, product variations for 2 hours and everything else for 2 Minutes.

This feature can also be used to benchmark the SSR render performance locally by caching all ICM calls.

Further References

• Concept - Configuration
• Concept - Deploy URL
• Concept - Hybrid Approach
• Concept - Logging
• Concept - Single Sign-On (SSO) for PWA
• Guide - Multiple Themes
• Guide - Client-Side Error Monitoring with Sentry
• Guide - Google Tag Manager
• Guide - Monitoring with Prometheus
• PM2
• YouTube - Server Side Rendering and Pre Rendering with Angular Universal
• Google Developers - Rendering on the Web