An Ember CLI addon that allows you to render and serve Ember.js apps on the server. Using FastBoot, you can serve rendered HTML to browsers and other clients without requiring them to download JavaScript assets.
Currently, the set of Ember applications supported is extremely limited. As we fix more issues, we expect that set to grow rapidly. See Known Limitations below for a full-list.
The bottom line is that you should not (yet) expect to install this add-on in your production app and have FastBoot work.
FastBoot requires Ember 2.3 or higher.
From within your Ember CLI application, run the following command:
ember install ember-cli-fastboot
ember fastboot --serve-assets- Visit your app at
http://localhost:3000.
You may be shocked to learn that minified code runs faster in Node than non-minified code, so you will probably want to run the production environment build for anything "serious."
ember fastboot --environment production
You can also specify the port (default is 3000):
ember fastboot --port 8088
See ember help fastboot for more.
While FastBoot is under active development, there are several major restrictions you should be aware of. Only the most brave should even consider deploying this to production.
Since didInsertElement hooks are designed to let your component
directly manipulate the DOM, and that doesn't make sense on the server
where there is no DOM, we do not invoke either didInsertElement nor
willInsertElement hooks.
Running most of jQuery requires a full DOM. Most of jQuery will just not be supported when running in FastBoot mode. One exception is network code for fetching models, which we intended to support, but doesn't work at present.
Right now, this is only useful for creating an HTML representation of your app at a particular route and serving it statically. Eventually, we will support also serving the JavaScript payload, which can takeover once it has finished loading and making the app fully interactive.
In the meantime, this is probably only useful for cURL or search crawlers.
Because your app is now running in Node.js, not the browser, you'll need a new set of tools to diagnose problems when things go wrong. Here are some tips and tricks we use for debugging our own apps.
Enable verbose logging by running the FastBoot server with the following environment variables set:
DEBUG=ember-cli-fastboot:* ember fastbootPRs adding or improving logging facilities are very welcome.
You can get a debugging environment similar to the Chrome developer tools running with a FastBoot app, although it's not (yet) as easy as in the browser.
First, install the Node Inspector:
npm install node-inspector -gMake sure you install a recent release; in our experience, older versions will segfault when used in conjunction with Contextify, which FastBoot uses for sandboxing.
Next, start the inspector server. We found the experience too slow to be
usable until we discovered the --no-preload flag, which waits to
fetch the source code for a given file until it's actually needed.
node-inspector --no-preloadOnce the debug server is running, you'll want to start up the FastBoot
server with Node in debug mode. One thing about debug mode: it makes
everything much slower. Since the ember fastboot command does a full
build when launched, this becomes agonizingly slow in debug mode.
Avoid the slowness by manually running the build in normal mode, then running FastBoot in debug mode without doing a build:
ember build && node --debug-brk ./node_modules/.bin/ember fastboot --no-buildThis does a full rebuild and then starts the FastBoot server in debug
mode. Note that the --debug-brk flag will cause your app to start
paused to give you a chance to open the debugger.
Once you see the output debugger listening on port 5858, visit
http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug?port=5858
in your browser. Once it loads, click the "Resume script execution"
button (it has a ▶︎ icon) to let FastBoot continue loading.
Assuming your app loads without an exception, after a few seconds you
will see a message that FastBoot is listening on port 3000. Once you see
that, you can open a connection; any exceptions should be logged in the
console, and you can use the tools you'd expect such as console.log,
debugger statements, etc.
Run the automated tests by running npm test.
Note that the integration tests create new Ember applications via ember new and thus have to run an npm install, which can take several
minutes, particularly on slow connections.
To speed up test runs you can run npm run test:precook to "precook" a
node_modules directory that will be reused across test runs.
Run the tests with the DEBUG environment variable set to
fastboot-test to see verbose debugging output.
DEBUG=fastboot-test npm test