MetalSmith Phantom

A Metalsmith plugin that will render frontend app html into a phantomjs browser and create static pages from it.

Your javascript will need to know how to handle these two states. I don't supply that

This helps with issues of Google indexing frontend Javascript project.

Setup

First off you need a Metalsmith project. The install metalsmith-phantom into your project.

npm install metalsmith-phantom -S

Next config the plugin to create the pages you would like.

var 
  MetalSmith = require('metalsmith'),
  phantom = require('./plugins/phantom')

MetalSmith()
  .use(
    phantom({ 
      'foo/bar/index.html' : { // path to save at
        path: 'index.html', // path to hit with server relative to build dir
        query: { // query string on path
          foo: 'bar'
        }
      },
      port: 5000, // this is port the static server will start on
      timeout: 5000  // wait 5000ms before timingout 
    })
  )
  .build(function(err){
    if(err) throw err;
  });

Signaling From Frontend

Right now, the best way to let PhantomJS know that your app is all rendered is to console log 'PageRendered'. eg.

console.log('PageRendered')

More options hopefully will be available.