thebennos/rendercat

The rendercat rendering engine

A DIY rendering engine for all your rendering needs based on NodeJS, Express, PhantomJS and SlimerJS amongst other tools.

For a fully functioning example please visit the project http://github.com/neilellis/rendercat-example or http://github.com/neilellis/rendercat-snapshot or use the demos online at http://rendercat-example-1.neilellis.cont.tutum.io/ or http://rendercat-snapshot-1.neilellis.cont.tutum.io/

To use rendercat create a new project with a Dockerfile like this:

FROM neilellis/rendercat

Make sure you have directories called public and modules these will be added automatically (you don't need to put instructions in your Dockerfile). The public directory contains static artifacts that will be served up by rendercat's Nginx instance. The modules directory should contain CommonJS style modules (see http://github.com/neilellis/rendercat-snapshot for an example of layout).

Rendercat makes available the functions in the modules using the following URL format

  /api/<api-version>/<module>/<function>

The current api version is 0.1.

The function should take only a single argument, the rc (Rendercat) object which also supplies a function for rendering URLs:

function render(rc) {
  var req= rc.req;
  var res= rc.res;
  
  ...
  
  rc.renderUsing(url, delay, lang, width, height, viewportWidth, viewportHeight, imageType, deviceType, function (result) {
                            //If result starts with 'FAIL' then rendering failed otherwise it is the
                            //rendered file location.
                           rc.res.redirect(result.replace("/app/public/", "/"));
                           rc.res.end();
                       });
}

and a function for running JavaScript within PhantomJS

 rc.inBrowser(function (ph) {
        ph.createPage(function (page) {
            page.open(address, function (status) {
              ...
            });
        });
  });

To understand how to use ph.createPage please read the documentation for the phantomjs-node project.

The recommended manner for adding NodeJS modules is by adding npm install x.y.z instructions in the Dockerfile.

Released under ASL 2.0 (c) 2014-2015 Neil Ellis