prerender-koa

Koa middleware for Prerender.io. Intercepts requests from bots and crawlers and serves prerendered HTML, so your JavaScript-rendered app is fully indexable by search engines and social media scrapers.

Compatible with Koa v2+ and Node.js 18+.

Installation

npm install prerender-koa

Usage

const Koa = require('koa');
const prerender = require('prerender-koa');

const app = new Koa();

app.use(prerender({
  token: 'YOUR_PRERENDER_TOKEN'
}));

// your other middleware and routes

The middleware intercepts bot requests and proxies them to Prerender.io, returning prerendered HTML. Regular browser requests pass through unaffected. All responses include an X-Prerender: true/false header.

Options

Option	Type	Default	Description
token	string	process.env.PRERENDER_TOKEN	Your Prerender.io token
serviceUrl	string	process.env.PRERENDER_SERVICE_URL or https://service.prerender.io/	Prerender service URL (use this for self-hosted Prerender)
protocol	string	null	Force a protocol (http or https). Defaults to the request's protocol

Environment variables

PRERENDER_TOKEN=your_token_here
PRERENDER_SERVICE_URL=https://service.prerender.io/  # optional

Self-hosted Prerender

app.use(prerender({
  serviceUrl: 'http://your-prerender-server:3000'
}));

How it works

Requests are prerendered when all of the following are true:

• The HTTP method is GET
• The User-Agent matches a known bot/crawler (Googlebot, Bingbot, Twitterbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.)
  — OR the URL contains _escaped_fragment_
  — OR the X-Bufferbot header is present
• The URL does not end with a static asset extension (.js, .css, .png, etc.)

Everything else passes through to your normal Koa middleware.

License

MIT