Elder.js: An Opinionated, SEO focused, Svelte Framework.

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Elder.js is an opinionated static site generator and web framework built with SEO in mind. (Supports SSR and Static Site Generation.)

Features:

• Build hooks allow you to plug into any part of entire page generation process and customize as needed.
• A Highly Optimized Build Process: that will span as many CPU cores as you can throw at it to make building your site as fast as possible. For reference Elder.js easily generates a data intensive 18,000 page site in 8 minutes using a budget 4 core VM.
• Svelte Everywhere: Use Svelte for your SSR templates and with partial hydration on the client for tiny html/bundle sizes.
• Straightforward Data Flow: By simply associating a data function in your route.js, you have complete control over how you fetch, prepare, and manipulate data before sending it to your Svelte template. Anything you can do in Node.js, you can do to fetch your data. Multiple data sources, no problem.
• Community Plugins: Easily extend what your Elder.js site can do by adding prebuilt plugins to your site.
• Shortcodes: Future proof your content, whether it lives in a CMS or in static files using smart placeholders.
• 0KB JS: Defaults to 0KB of JS if your page doesn't need JS.
• Partial Hydration: Unlike most frameworks, Elder.js lets you hydrate just the parts of the client that need to be interactive allowing you to dramatically reduce your payloads while still having full control over component lazy-loading, preloading, and eager-loading.

Context

Elder.js is the result of our team's work to build this site (ElderGuide.com) and was purpose built to solve the unique challenges of building flagship SEO sites with 10-100k+ pages.

Elder Guide Co-Founder Nick Reese has built or managed 5 major SEO properties over the past 14 years. After leading the transition of several complex sites to static site generators he loved the benefits of the JAM stack, but wished there was a better solution for complex, data intensive, projects. Elder.js is his vision for how static site generators can become viable for sites of all sizes regardless of the number of pages or how complex the data being presented is.

We hope you find this project useful whether you're building a small personal blog or a flagship SEO site that impacts millions of users.

Project Status: Stable

Elder.js is stable and production ready.

It is being used on on this site and 2 other flagship SEO properties that are managed by the maintainers of this project.

We believe Elder.js has reached a level of maturity where we have achieved the majority of the vision we had for the project when we set out to build a static site generator.

Our goal is to keep the hookInterface, plugin interface, and general structure of the project as static as possible.

This is a lot of words to say we’re not looking to ship a bunch if breaking changes any time soon, but will be shipping bug fixes and incremental changes that are mostly “under the hood.”

As September 2020, the ElderGuide.com team expects to maintain this project at least until 2023-2024. For a clearer vision of what we mean by this and what to expect from the maintainers as far as what is considered "in scope" and what isn't, please see this comment.

Getting Started:

The quickest way to get started is to get started with the Elder.js template using degit:

Here is a demo of the template: https://elderjs.netlify.app/

Step 1: Clone Template

npx degit Elderjs/template elderjs-app
cd elderjs-app

Step 2: Install Dependencies

npm install # or just yarn

Step 3: Start the Project

npm start

Navigate to http://localhost:3000. You should see your app running.

Developing using the Template:

For development, we recommend running two separate terminals. One for the server and the other for rollup.

Terminal 1: Server

npm run dev:server # `npm start` above starts a server, but doesn't rebuild your Svelte components on change.

Terminal 2: Rollup

npm run dev:rollup # This rebuilds your svelte components on change.

Once you have these two terminals open, edit a component file in src, save it, and reload the page to see your changes.

To Build/Serve HTML:

npm run build

Let the build finish.

npx sirv-cli public

Why We Built Elder.js

When we set out to build elderguide.com we tested 6 different static site generators (Gatsby, Next.js, Nuxt.js, 11ty, Sapper and Hydrogen.js) and ultimately realized there wasn’t a solution that ticked all of our boxes.

On our journey we had 3 major realizations:

1. Most SSGs are built for either simple sites/blogs or for full scale "app frameworks" that have added an 'export' process added as an afterthought.
2. Fetching data from multiple sources (dbs, apis, config files, markdown files) can lead to major code spaghetti.
3. Client side routing adds a huge amount of complexity (and bundle size) to initial loads for very little SEO benefit. If you aren’t building an App, why would we want to fully hydrate our JS framework just for faster routing? Browsers are great at routing… we should only be hydrating things that need to be hydrated.

Initially we decided to go with Sapper but hit major data roadblocks and issues unusable build times and development reload times.

In an afternoon of frustration, we whipped up a very rudimentary SSG with a complex and error prone process of adding Svelte components… but it worked. #productionready

After shipping ElderGuide.com to production we were working on a refactor when a moment of genius from Kevin over at Svelte School prompted a major breakthrough that allowed us to use Svelte 100% for templating and still get partial hydration even thought Svelte doesn’t support it.

After much consideration we decided to open source the project so others could use it.

We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Routes

At the core of any site are it's "routes" or templates.

In Elder.js a route is made up of 2 files that live in your route folder: ./src/routes/${routeName}/ folder.

They are:

1. A route.js file. This is where you define route details such as the route’s permalink function, all function and data function.
2. A Svelte component to be used as a template matches the ${routeName}. eg: ./src/routes/blog/Blog.svelte (from here on out we refer to these specific Svelte components as "Svelte Templates")

Route.js

route.js files consist of a permalink function, an all function, and a data function.

Elder.js uses "explicit routing" instead of the more common "parameter based" routing found in most frameworks like express.

At first, Elder.js' non-conventional routing can be intimidating, but it offers some major benefits discussed below while streamlining data flow in complex sites.

Let's look at an example of how you'd setup a route like /blog/:slug/ where there are only 2 blogposts.

// ./src/routes/blog/route.js
module.exports = {
  template: 'Blog.svelte',
  permalink: ({ request }) => `/blog/${request.slug}/`, // this is the same as /blog/:slug/ in 'parameter based' routing.
  all: async () => {
    // The all function returns an array of all possible "request" objects for a route.
    // Here we are explicitly defining every possible variation of this route.
    return [!span!],
  },
  data: async ({ request }) => {
  // The object returned here will be available in the Blog.svelte as the 'data' prop.
  return {
    blogpost: `This is the blogpost for the slug: ${request.slug}`.
  }
};

Here is what is happening in plain English:

• permalink(): The permalink function is similar to your standard route definition you'd see with placeholders. This means /blog/:slug/ would be defined as /blog/${request.slug}/. The permalink function's job is to take the request objects returned from all and transform them into relative urls.
• all(): This async function returns an array of all of the request objects for a given route. Often this array may come from a data store but in this example we're explicitly saying we only have 2 blog posts, so only two pages will be generated.
• data(): The data function prepares the data required in the Blog.svelte file. Whatever object is returned will be available as the data prop. In the example we are just returning a static string, but you could also hit an external CMS, query a database, or read from the file system. Anything you can do in node, you can do here.

In this example, we're just returning a simple object in our data() function, but we could have easily used node-fetch and gotten our blogpost from a CMS or used fs to read from the filesystem:

const blogpost = await fetch(
  `https://api.mycms.com/getBySlug/${request.slug}/`
).then((res) => res.json());

Why Routing Differs from Express-like Frameworks

Elder.js' approach to routing is unconventional but it offers several distinct advantages, the two biggest are:

1. Unlike traditional 'parameter based' routing, Elder.js' does not have to crawl all of the links of a site to know what pages need to be generated. This allows for fully parallelized build times that scale with CPU resources. (As of October 2020, ElderGuide.com has ~20k pages and builds in 1 minute 22 seconds.)
2. Users have full control over their URL structure. No complex regex is needed to have /senior-living/:facilityId/ and /senior-living/:articleId/ and /senior-living/:parentCompanyId/. This also makes i18n and l10n much more approachable.

Route.js Best Practices:

With the simple route.js example out of the way, let's talk about best practices and let's look at a more complex example of a route.js file.

Best Practice: A route's all function should return the minimum viable data points needed generate a page.

Skinny request objects. Fat data functions.

When people first encounter Elder.js there is a strong temptation to load the request objects returned by a route's all function with tons of data.

While this approach works, it doesn't scale very well. Fetching, preparing, and processing data should be done in your data function.

That said, it is recommend that you only include the bare minimum required to query your database, api, file system, or data store on the request object. From there do all of the data fetching, preparing, and organization in the route's data function.

Real World Example

To drive this point home and to show a more complex example of routing, imagine you're building a travel site that lists tourist attractions for major cities throughout the world.

You have a city route and for each page on that route you need 3 data points to query your API, database, or datastore in order to pull in all of the rest of the page's data.

These data points are:

1. The language of the page being generated
2. The City slug
3. The Country slug

Here is what a minimal route.js would look like to support /en/spain/barcelona/ and /es/espana/barcelona/.

// ./src/routes/city/route.js
module.exports = {
  permalink: ({ request, settings }) =>
    `/${request.lang}/${request.country.slug}/${request.slug}/`,
  all: async () => {
    return [!br!];
  },
  data: async ({ request }) => {
    // discussed below.
  },
};

Problems with Fat Request Objects

Imagine for a moment that we attempted to include all of the additional details needed to generate the page for this route in our request objects like so:

module.exports = {
  // permalink function
  all: async () => {
    return [!br!], ...lotsOfData } },
      { slug: 'barcelona', country: { slug: 'espana' }, lang: 'es' data: { hotels: 12, attractions: 14, promotions: [!span!], ...lotsOfData } }
    ]
  }
  // data function
}

Now imagine in your data function looks like so and you're getting more data.

module.exports = {
  // permalink function
  all: async () => {
    return [!br!], ...lotsOfData } },
      { slug: 'barcelona', country: { slug: 'espana' }, lang: 'es' data: { hotels: 12, attractions: 14, promotions: [!span!], ...lotsOfData } }
    ]
  },
  data:  async ({ request }) => {
    const hotels = [!br!];

    // this will now be available in your svelte template as your 'data' param.
    // you could access all of the hotel details at `data.hotels`
    return {
      hotels,
    };
  },
}

With this implementation you've now got both request and data objects in Svelte templates and you're asking yourself:

Should I be accessing request.data.hotels or just data.hotels.length to get the number of hotels?

Save yourself this headache by remembering: skinny request objects, fat data functions.

Only store the minimum data needed on your request objects. Instead return all of the data required by the page from the data function.

Note: If you're interested in i18n please look at this issue as robust support could be offered by a community plugin.

Database Connections, APIs, and External Data Sources

The data function of each route is designed to be the central place to fetch data for a route but the implementation details are very open ended and up to you.

Just about anything you can do in Node.js you can do in a data function.

That said, if you are hitting a DB and want to manage your connection in a reusable fashion, the recommended way of doing so is to populate the query object on the bootstrap hook.

Using this pattern allows you to share a database connection across the entire lifecycle of your Elder.js site.

Cache Data Where Possible Within Route.js Files

If you have a data heavy calculation required to generate a page, look into calculating that data and caching it before your module.exports definition like so:

// ./src/routes/city/route.js

// do heavy calculation here
// this prevents the data from being calculated each request
const cityLookupObject = {
   barcelona: {
   // lots of data.
  }
}

module.exports = {
  permalink: ({ request, settings }) =>
    `/${request.lang}/${request.country.slug}/${request.slug}/`,
  all: async () => {
    return [!br!];
  },
  data: async ({ request }) => {

    return {
      city: cityLookupObject[!request!];
    }

  },
};

Data Used in Multiple Routes

If you have data that is used in multiple routes, you can share that data between routes by populating the data object on the boostrap hook documented later in this guide.

Assuming you have populated the data.cities with an array of cities on the boostrap hook you could access it like so:

// ./src/routes/city/route.js
module.exports = {
  permalink: ({ request }) => `/${request.slug}/`,
  all: async ({ data }) => data.cities,
  data: async ({ request, data }) => {
    return {
      city: data.cities.find(city=> city.slug === request.slug);
    }

  },
};

Data defined in boostrap is available on all routes.

all() Function Spec

Here is the function signature for a route.js all function:

all: async ({ settings, query, data, helpers }): Array<Object> => {
  // settings: this describes the Elder.js settings at initialization.
  // query: an empty object that is usually populated on the 'bootstrap' hook with a database connection or api connection. This is sharable throughout all hooks, functions, and shortcodes.
  // data: any data set on the 'bootstrap' hook.
  return Array<Object>;
}

permalink() Function Spec

Here is the function signature for a route.js permalink function:

permalink: ({ request, settings }): String => {
  // NOTE: permalink must be sync. Async is not supported.

  // request: this is the object received from the all() function. Generally we recommend passing a 'slug' parameter but you can use any naming you want.
  // settings: this describes the Elder.js bootstrap settings.
  return String;
};

data() Function Spec

Whether you’re building a personal blog or complex data driven SEO site, a route's data function is the recommend place to fetch (from a db, api, or other source) and prepare data to be consumed by your Svelte templates.

Here is the function signature for a route.js data function:

data: async ({
  data, // any data set by plugins or hooks on the 'bootstrap' hook
  helpers, // Elder.js helpers and user helpers from the ./src/helpers/index.js` file.
  allRequests, // all of the `request` objects returned by a route's all() function.
  settings, // settings of Elder.js
  request, // the requested page's `request` object.
  errors, // any errors
  perf, // the performance helper.
  query, // search for 'query' in these docs for more details on it's use.
}): Object => {
  // data is any data set from plugins or hooks.
  return Object;
};

Hooks: How to Customize Elder.js

Elder.js hooks are designed to be modular, sharable, and easily bundled in to Elder.js plugins for common use cases... while still giving developers of all skill levels an easy way to customize core page generation logic to their own needs.

For a full overview of the hooks available, you can reference the hookInterface.ts or the hooks list below.

In short there is a hook at every major step of the page generation process from system bootstrap (the bootstrap hook) all the way to writing html to your computer (on the requestComplete hook).

The Goal of Elder.js Hooks

No project becomes a 'tangled mess' on day one. It happens over time.

You or someone on your team makes a small "hacky" fix.

This change was intended to be temporary but it falls off your team's radar.

Over time these "hacky" fixes build up and slowly make a project hard to reason about and hard to work on.

The goal of Elder.js' hook implementation is that any changes that don't fit in a route.js file are instead aggregated in a single hooks.js file where anyone on a team will know to expect to find any hidden complexity.

The result of this approach is that of a project's hacky fixes are no longer scattered across a project, but instead live in a single self documenting location where users have complete but predictable control over the Elder.js page generation process.

The added benefit is that plugins can also tap into these hooks offering sharable functionality.

Hook Interface: the mutable and props Arrays

Each Elder.js hook explicitly defines which props are available to a function registered on a hook along with which of those props are mutable by that function.

This defines the "contract" that Elder.js' hook interface implements.

• props represents the parameters that are available to a function registered on a hook.
• mutable represents which of the props can be changed on a specific hook.

This structure was implemented to keep mutation and side effects predictable.

Under the hood, all items in the props array that aren't in the mutable array are passed as a Proxy.

Hook Lifecycle

Hook Example 1: bootstrap

Here is the bootstrap hook from the hookInterface.ts file.

// From hookInterface.ts
{
  "hook": "bootstrap",
  "props": [!br!],
  "mutable": [!br!],
  "context": "Routes, plugins, and hooks have been collected and validated.",
  "use": "\
    Often used to populate the empty query object with a database or API connection as query is passed to the all() function which is used to generate request objects.\
    Internally used to automatically populate the helpers object with the helpers found in './src/helpers/index.js'.\
    Can be used to set information on the data object that is needed throughout the entire lifecycle. (sitewide settings)\
    ",
  "location": "Elder.ts",
  "experimental": false,
  "advanced": false
};

This hook is executed after Elder.js has bootstrapped itself and lets users run arbitrary functions at that point too.

Internally Elder.js uses this hook to automatically any user defined helpers ./src/helpers/index.js to the helpers prop that is available on other hooks, in Svelte templates, and data functions.

Here is what a simple hook defined in your ./src/hook.js file might look like if you wanted to add a database connection to the query object which is available every time a hook is called:

// ./src/hooks.js
const db = require('../db');
module.exports = [!br!], // this is used to disable internal hooks. Adding this would disabled writing your files on build.
  }
  ...

Plugins

Plugins are prepackaged hooks and/or routes that can be used to add additional functionality to an Elder.js site.

Plugins also have the added bonus of having their own isolated closure scope where they can store data between hooks invocations.

To use a plugin, it must be registered in your elder.config.js and can be loaded from ./src/plugins/${pluginName}/index.js or from the entry point to an npm package ./node_modules/${pluginName}/

Official Plugins:

• Images Easily add and manage responsive images with your Elder.js website.
• Markdown An extensible markdown parser for Elder.js powered by remark. Take a folder of markdown and automatically populate your route's data object.
• Critical Path CSS Quickly and easily generate and include critical path css for your Elder.js website.
• Sitemap Automatically generate the latest sitemap for your Elder.js website on build.
• Browser Reload Reload the browser when your Elder.js server restarts.
• References Easily add wikipedia style references to your content with ref and referenceList shortcodes.

Other Plugin Ideas:

• Want to upload your statically generated files to S3? Perfect use case for a plugin. (See plugin example below)
• RSS feed plugin

Writing Your Own Plugin

If you're looking to write you own plugin for Elder.js, we've setup an easy template to clone.

Here is the command you can use to clone it locally without all of the git history using degit.

npx degit Elderjs/plugin-template elderjs-plugin
cd elderjs-plugin

Plugin Example 1: S3 Upload

Here is what a plugin looks like:

const plugin: PluginOptions = {
  name: "elder-plugin-upload-s3",
  description: "Uploads html and/or data.json file to s3",
  init: (plugin) => {
    // console.log(plugin); => returns this plugin object.
    plugin.data = { test: true };
    // NOTE! any data added in any hook or in the init function will
    // be persisted for the entire lifecycle of elder.js
    // this means the closure persists between server.js loads AND between pages during build.
    // Temporary data can be stored on this object,
    // but it is up to the plugin to clean up after itself and manage its own state.
    return plugin;
  },
  hooks: [!br!],
  config: {
    dataBucket: process.env.AWS_S3_DATA_BUCKET || "",
    htmlBucket: process.env.AWS_S3_BUCKET || "",
    deployId: process.env.DEPLOY_ID || false,
  },
};

This plugin registers function executions on two hooks, the dataComplete hook and the requestComplete hook. In each, it uploads the data or html to the s3 bucket specified in the user's elder.config.js.

Svelte Templates, Svelte Layouts, and Svelte Components

Within Elder.js there is a subtle distinction between how different Svelte files are compiled.

• Svelte Components live in your ./src/components/ folder and are called from within Svelte Templates and Svelte Layouts. (eg: ./src/components/Widget/Widget.svelte)
• Svelte Templates are defined for each route (eg: ./src/routes/blog/Blog.svelte) and are only rendered on the server because they receive props of data, helpers, request, and settings.
• Svelte Layouts live in your ./src/layouts/ folder and are only rendered on the server because they receive props of data, helpers, request, settings, and templateHtml.

While this may seem complex, the reasoning for Svelte Templates and Svelte Layouts only being server rendered is because they receive sensitive props that may contain data you don't want written in your html. (database credentials, env variables, auth keys, etc)

On a practical level, most of your Svelte files will live in your ./src/components/ folder and you can hydrate them from within Svelte Templates or Svelte Layouts as defined below.

Partial Hydration

Elder.js give you fine grained control over what parts of your site are "hydrated" on the client and which aren't.

If you aren't sure what should be hydrated and what shouldn't, the general rule of thumb is that if a component needs to be interactive on the client, you need to hydrate it.

To hydrate a component, simply use the following markup in either your Svelte Template or Svelte Layout files. (eg: ./src/routes/blog/Blog.svlete or ./src/layouts/Layout.svelte)

// within any Svelte template
 <MyComponent hydrate-client={{somethingCool: true}} />

In this example, the component MyComponent will receive the props of somethingCool = true which you'd access from within the component like so:

<!-- ./src/components/MyComponent.svelte -->
<script>
  export let somethingCool;
</script>

Understanding Partial hydration

In the above example what will happen is that in your HTML you'll see that Elder.js has mounted a new root component and set the in initial props to {somethingCool: true}.

This means that once the user visits the page generated by Elder.js, Svelte will make that specific component interactive.

There are two differences between partial hydration and the way most frameworks handle hydration:

1. With partial hydration you're only sending the data needed to make the respective components interactive instead of data for the whole page.
2. With partial hydration you end up with multiple root components instead of one main component root. (Don't worry, you can still use Svelte stores to allow them to easily share state across them.)

The end result is generally smaller bundle/page sizes and less work for the main thread. is that we're only hydrating what is needed by the client instead of all of the data to build the page.

Note: All props needed by the Svelte component must be included in hydrate-client={{}} and should be JSON.stringify() friendly. This means no functions, cyclical references, etc.

// Doesn't work
<Component {ssrProp} hydrate-client={{ clientProp }} />

// Works
<Component hydrate-client={{ ssrProp, clientProp }} />

Hydration Options:

To give you fine grained control over how a Svelte component behaves when it is mounted the following hydrate-options can be defined:

• hydrate-options={{ loading: 'lazy' }} This is the default config, uses intersection observer to 'lazily' mount the Svelte component.
• hydrate-options={{ loading: 'eager' }} This would cause the component to be hydrate in a blocking manner as soon as the js is rendered.
• hydrate-options={{ loading: 'none' }} This allows you to add the HTML from a Svelte component, but not to hydrate it on the client. (only really useful with helpers.inlineSvelteComponent and possibly advanced shortcode usages.)
• hydrate-options={{ preload: true }} This adds a preload to the head stack as outlined above... could be preloaded without forcing blocking.
• hydrate-options={{ preload: true, loading: 'eager' }} This would preload and be blocking.
• hydrate-options={{ rootMargin: '500px', threshold: 0 }} This would adjust the root margin of the intersection observer. Only usable with loading: 'lazy'

How partial hydration works under the covers.

On the homepage of elderguide.com we use the following code to hydrate the autocomplete component:

// within elderguide.com’s Home.svelte
 <HomeAutoComplete hydrate-client={{ nh_count: data.nh_count }} />

You can do the same for a component without any props by using:

  <NoPropsHere hydrate-client={{}} />

At a high level what is happening is that when the Svelte template components are compiled on the server, we've included a preprocessor that causes the Svelte compiler to instead render a div with a few specific elements and the prop passed into hydrate-client is simply JSON.stringified.

Later when we go to render these templates, we look for the removed components, generate the server rendered version and include the client component in the generated JS with the props that were given in hydrate-client.

Security Note: Whatever you pass to hydrate-client will get written to the HTML shipped to the browser via devalue. There are XSS and security considerations of passing data to the client.

If you are curious the files to look at are: partialHydration.ts and svelteComponent.ts.

The important thing to note is that still use Svelte variables in hydrate-client as long as they can be processed by JSON.stringify.

Shortcodes: Customizing and Future Proofing Your Content

Whether your content lives in markdown files, on Prismic, Contentful, WordPress, Strapi, your own CMS, at some point you or someone who is managing the content will want to add some 'functionality' to this otherwise static content.

These functionalities come in a few flavors:

• Embedding an arbitrary Svelte component directly within the content.
• Adding custom HTML to style/wrap content or achieve design goals.
• Updating this otherwise static content automatically when a dynamic datapoint changes.
• Creating a placeholder so that data can be fetched from an external service such as twitter/instagram and still be available via SSR. (Example: Server rendering your latest tweets.)

Adding this type of functionality is a nightmare and is a huge source of content debt and tech debt for SEO sites.

To make these situations more approachable, Elder.js offers shortcodes.

Overview

If you aren't familiar with shortcodes, they are just strings that can wrap content or have their own attributes:

• Self Closing: {{shortcode attribute="" /}}
• Wrapping: {{shortcode attribute=""}}wraps{{/shortcode}}

NOTE: The {{ and }} brackets vary from system to system and can be configured in your elder.config.js. However the / prefix for the closing bracket is not configurable. You may therefore need to translate shortcodes written in another format into this format expected by Elder.js, with a simple string replace strategy.

In Elder.js shortcodes are added in your ./src/shortcode.js or via plugins.

Use Cases For Shortcodes:

Adding a Component Directly in Static Content

Imagine you want to empower the content team to embed a Svelte widget component anywhere within their content.

Out of the box Elder.js adds a shortcode for this.

Simply tell them to add {{svelteComponent name="widget" props="{blue: true}" /}} to their markup and Elder.js will hydrate and mount that component.

Adding custom HTML to style/wrap content or achieve design goals.

Imagine you're at work and the design team asks you to wrap small pieces of content with a wrapper of <div class="bg-gray mb-1 p-2"> to 100 pieces of content... but having seen this situation before you realize that within 3 weeks it will probably need to be: <div class="bg-gray mb-2 p-3 somethingelse">.

So to future proof this code change you introduce a box shortcode and you wrap your content in it like so:

{{box type="gray"}}
  Your content here
{{/box}}

Then in your shortcodes.js you add the following:

module.exports = [!br!];

Updating Datapoints in Static Content

The most common type of content debt is data sensitive content debt.

This is where your otherwise static content needs to have some arbitrary data point updated within it.

This is a common use case for us here at ElderGuide.com.

On our content we often need to write things like: The US has {{numberOfNursingHomes /}} nursing homes nationwide.

Using shortcodes to make sure {{numberOfNursingHomes /}}is always up-to-date future proofs us from having this content debt.

Since our data comes from a database and all implementations will differ a bit, we'll steal the example from the Elder.js Template instead.

Imagine you need to always show the latest {{numberOfPages /}} on your site but you don't want to update {{numberOfPages /}} each time you publish a new blog post.

Here is how you'd create a shortcode using Elder.js internals to do just that:

module.exports = [!br!]

Now, you can update your site to use {{numberOfPages /}} and any time the page count changes, so will the placeholder.

Advanced: A Placeholder For External Data/Content

One of the most powerful usecases for shortcodes is to use them as a placeholder external data fetching.

Imagine you want the ability to display your latest tweet in a specific spot across multiple pages.

You setup the {{latestTweet /}} shortcode and instead of just returning the latest tweet, we also want to add some css and js to the page as well.

Here is the full power of how you'd implement this:

// import 'node-fetch', 'axios'
// ./src/shortcodes.js
module.exports = [!br!];

Shortcode Spec:

Shortcodes are defined by users by adding them to the array in their ./src/shortcodes.js.

In the spec below there is a simple example that returns a string and a full example that returns an object.

// ./src/shortcodes.js

module.exports = [!br!];

Data Flow

Here is a detailed overview of how data flows through an Elder.js application from 'bootstrap' all the way to a generated HTML page.

1. Everything starts in a site's route.js files

Below is the example route.js file we'll be following the flow of.

// `/routes/blog/route.js` <-- NOTE: 'blog' is the route name.
module.exports = {
  all: async ({ query, settings data, helpers }) => {
    // await query.db(`your implementation here`) or await query.api(`get data`);
    // something that returns an array of the minimum required data for the route.
    return [!span!];
  },
  permalink: ({ request, settings }) => {
    return `/blog/${request.slug}/`;
  },
  data: async ({request, query, settings, helpers, data }) =>{
    // we'll look at this function below.
  }

  // template: 'Blog.svelte' is assumed if not defined. (note: capitalized first letter.)
  // layout: 'Layout.svelte' is assumed if not defined.
}

2. Elder.js Bootstrap Itself

During this process Elder.js validates all of the routes, plugins, hooks. It then runs the 'bootstrap' hook.

Finally the all function each route is executed.

Together the aggregate result of each route's all function is referred to as allRequests.

3. The allRequests Hook is Run

This allows users to modify the allRequests array. If you modify or add to this array of objects make sure each result has a 'request.route' key.

4. Full 'request' Objects are Built

Once Elder.js has a full list of requests, it then builds permalinks and full 'request' objects that will be consumed by hooks, data functions, Svelte templates, and Svelte layouts.

The full request object will look something like so (truncated for clarity):

request = {
  slug: `why-kittens-rock`,
  // ... any other keys from the `request` object returned from the `all` function.

  // below is then added by Elder.js
  permalink: "/blog/why-kittens-rock",
  route: "blog",
  type: "build", // server or build.
};

It is important to note that all of the params of the 'request' objects returned by the all function will be present in the 'request' object even though our example only uses slug.

5. Hooks are Executed Until the data function is Executed

The data flows through all of the hooks until it reaches a route's data function.

How you modify the data in your data function is up to you. Anything you can do in Node.js you can do here.

module.exports = async ({ query, settings, request, data }) => {
  // do magic to get data from your data store.
  // const yourData = await query.db(`SELECT * FROM city WHERE slug = $1`, [!request!])
  // or
  // const yourData = await query.api.get(`https://yourdata.com/api/city/${request.slug}`)...
  const yourData = {
    sweet: "Golden Metal",
  };
  return yourData;
};

6. The 'data' hook is Executed

The data hook is generally used by plugins to modify data for a route.

If for some reason you have an empty data object, check that your plugins and hooks aren't returning just their data, instead of using a pattern like so:

return {
  data: {
    ...data, // this is from the parameter of the hook function.
    ...additionalData, // this data from the hook or plugin.
  },
};

You can debug this by setting debug.hooks: true in your elder.config.js.

7. The data Object is passed to the Svelte template

In this example, ./src/routes/blog/Blog.svelte may look like this:

<script>
  export let data; // here is the 'data' object we've been following.
  export let settings; // Elder.js settings
  export let helpers; // Elder.js helpers and user helpers.
  export let request; // 'request' object from above. ....
</script>

8. The HTML returned by Blog.svelte is passed into Layout.svelte

Svelte layouts receive the same props as the template file but also include a routeHTML prop which would be the html from Blog.svelte in this example.

9. Page Generation Completes

All further hooks are run until the 'request' has been completed.

This includes user hooks, system hooks, and plugin hooks.

Specifications and Config

Below are details on common specifications and config requirements.

Config: elder.config.js

By default Elder.js looks for an elder.config.js file in your project root and will import any settings there and merge them with the default.

Below is what the default configuration file looks like. This is automatically generated if an elder.config.js file is missing.

module.exports = {
  origin: "", // The domain your site is hosted on. https://yourdomain.com.
  rootDir: "process.cwd()", // Here your package.json lives.
  distDir: "public", // Where should files be written? This represents the "root" of your site and where your html will be built.
  srcDir: "src", // Where Elder.js should find it's expected file structure. If you are using a build step such as typescript on your project you may need to edit this. 
  debug: {
    stacks: false, // Outputs details of stack processing in the console.
    hooks: false, // Output details of hook execution in the console.
    shortcodes: false, // Output details of shortcode execution in the console.
    performance: false, // Outputs a detailed speed report on each pageload.
    build: false, // Displays detailed build information for each worker.
    automagic: false, // Displays settings or actions that are automagically done to help with debugging.
  }
  hooks: {
    disable: [!span!] ('blog' in this example)
| -- | -- | -- Blog.svelte
| -- | -- | -- route.js
| -- plugins
| -- | -- [!plugin!] ('elderjs-plugin-markdown' for example)
| -- | -- | -- index.js
| -- components
| -- | -- [!component!] ('Contact' in this example)
| -- | -- | -- Contact.svelte

(optional/recommended)
| -- assets
| -- | -- files to be copied to your public folder.

Hook Specification

Hooks are the core of how to make site level customizations. Below is the default spec for a hook.

module.exports = {
  hook: "", // The hook the defined "run" function should be executed on.
  name: "", // A user friendly name of the function to be run.
  description: "", // A description of what the function does.
  priority: 50, // The priority level a hook should run at. The highest priority is 100 and 1 is the lowest priority.
  run: ()=> {}, // The function to be run on the hook.
  $meta: {
    type: "", // What type of hook this is. Defined by Elder.js for debugging.
    addedBy: "", // Where the hook was added from. Defined by Elder.js for debugging.
  }
}

Plugin Specification

Plugins are a bundle of hooks with their own closure scope based on the object that is returned by the init() function. This means that all hooks and shortcodes receive the plugin definition returned by the init() function and are able to store properties in that scope throughout the hook lifecycle. Below is the default specification for a plugin.

module.exports = {
  name: "", // The name of the plugin.
  description: "", // A description of the plugin.
  init: ()=> {}, // A sync function that handles the plugin init. Receives plugin definition. plugin.settings contains Elder.js config. plugin.config contains plugin config
  routes: {}, // (optional) Any routes the plugin is adding.
  hooks: [!span!], // Array of shortcodes
}

Route Specification

Routes can be defined by plugins or by including a ./src/[!routeName!]/route.js file.

module.exports = {
  template: "", // Svelte file for your route. Defaults to RouteName.svelte if not defined.
  all: ()=> {}, // A sync/async function that returns an array of all of the 'request objects' for this route.
  permalink: ()=> {}, // Sync function that turns request objects from the all() function into permalinks which are relative to the site root
  data: ()=> {}, // Async/sync function that returns a JS object. Can also be a plain JS object.
}

Shortcode Specification

Shortcodes are a great way to future proof your content. Below is the default shortcode specification. These should be defined in the array exported by your ./src/shortcodes.js

module.exports = [!br!]

Requirements for name and description fields

In various places such as on hooks, plugins, and stacks, you'll see that Elder.js requires name and description fields.

While this requirement may seem like an added development burden initially, it makes it extremely easy for you to publicly share your hooks or bundle them into plugins in a way others can use. (Plus your future self will thank you when you need to modify your code a year from now.)

These fields are also used to generate the pretty printouts of how long each hook is adding to your page generation time that you see when you enable debug.performance = true in your elder.config.js.

As a team we've found build times to be especially important when building 10k+ page sites as 100ms adds 16+ minutes to your build time. What gets measured gets managed... and we know faster deploys leads to deploying more often.

Stacks: Predictable String Concatenation

In a few places you may see that Elder.js is using 'stacks.' These are just our internal way of processing strings that need to be concatenated.

Here are the type defs:

export type StackItem = {
  source: string;
  string: string;
  priority: number;
  name: string;
};

export type Stack = Array<StackItem>;

In short a stack is an array of objects that are concatenated together in order. Think of it like a queue. An item with a priority of 1 is the lowest priority. An item with a priority of 100 is the highest.

Hooks can add items to the stack, when the stack is processed it is sorted in order of priority and then all strings are concatenated.

Automatic Behavior

Elder.js does quite a bit of automatic behavior much of which is based on using the standard filesystem.

Instead of burying this magic, things that happen automagically are logged to the console unless you set debug.automagic = false in your elder.config.js file. That said, here are some of the things that happen automatically:

• All exports from ./src/helpers/index.js are imported and added to the helpers object which is available in the data functions and all hooks.
• All hooks in your ./src/hooks.js file, ./routes/[!routeName!]/route.js files, and plugins are imported in validated.
• All optional variables in your routes file will be set automatically if Elder.js detects that the files needed are present.

Default Helpers

By default Elder.js adds a few items to the helpers object that is available in hooks, Svelte templates/layouts, and data functions.

• permalink: A permalink resolver: helpers.permalink[!routeName!]({requestObject}). Simply pass in a request object and it'll resolve the permalink. It is often used like so helpers.permalink.blog({slug: 'kittens-rock'}).
• shortcode: A more comfortable way to use shortcodes within Svelte files. Common usage within a .svelte file may look like : { @html helpers.shortcode({name: 'box', props: {class: "yellow"}, content: "content string here" }) }. If you are using the default Elder.js shortcode brackets, this would output {{box class='yellow'}}content string here{{/box}} which would be parsed like any other shortcode.
• inlineSvelteComponent: This helper is mainly useful when needing to add a Svelte component to your html via, hooks, plugins, or custom shortcodes. All of the options available when hydrating a component are available with this helper, it simply outputs the required hydration html so that Elder.js picks it up and hydrates the client. helpers.inlineSvelteComponent({name: 'Foo', props: { anything: true }, options: { preload: true, eager: true }})

Elder.js Exports:

server

Elder.js was built as a static site generator, but it offers a built-in server that is pretty snappy past the initial bootstrap phase.

This can be used to power server rendered (SSR) apps or used to preview the output of your static site without having to build.

You can see how this functionality is utilized in the elderjs-template.

build

The build function exported from Elder.js uses Node's cluster module to use multiple processes to build your site.

In short, here is how build works at a high level:

The main process runs through bootstrap and collects allRequests. It then spins up workers and divides the requests evenly across these workers. It then waits for the workers to complete, runs any hooks for after build and completes.

There are two notable config options: numberOfWorkers and shuffleRequests which you can read about in the config section.

getRollupConfig

A function that generates all of the Elder.js required rollup output.

See the clonable template for the minimum viable rollup config.

Replacements

If you need to add values to be replaced during bundling, you can do so like this:

const { getRollupConfig } = require("@elderjs/elderjs");
const svelteConfig = require("./svelte.config");
module.exports = [!br!];

getElderConfig

A helper function that returns the user's elder.config.js with defaults added in where they aren't defined.

FAQ

How can I disable a hook?

You can disable core Elder.js hooks, just like any other hook. Simply add the hook name to the hooks.disable array in your elder.config.js.

A full list of all of the hooks can be found in the hooks.ts.

For instance, if you wanted to disable the intersection observer, simply make sure your hooks.disable array includes elderAddDefaultIntersectionObserver as shown below:

// elder.config.js, truncated

hooks: {
  disable: [!span!],
},

How can I copy files to public?

The template project has a hook that copies your ./assets/ folder to the 'distDir' location defined in your elder.config.js.

Why can't I use Svelte templates for data fetching/manipulation?

If you’re familiar with Sapper you may be accustomed to storing your data fetching and manipulation logic in your Svelte files.

Initially when designing Elder.js we experimented with this approach but found that a separate data function which returned a single data object ready to be consumed by your svelte template was a cleaner separation of concerns.

data functions for fetching, manipulating, and returning data. Svelte for handling data presentation, interactivity, and reactivity.

Note: If you really want to do data fetching and manipulation in your templates nothing is stopping you.

How Does Elder.js Differ From Sapper?

Sapper is a full stack Svelte framework that does server side rendering and supports static exporting of your site.

While we found Sapper to be a nice solution for small sites, when we tried to use it to build out elderguide.com we hit some major roadblocks:

1. V1 of our internal test site had about ~500 pages. Sapper was talking about 15 minutes to build our site and we had worked hard to improve that speed. Since we knew our site would have over 100k pages in the coming years we knew we needed a different solution.
2. Sapper uses a file encoded routing system. This means that /blog/[!id!]/ becomes /blog/:id/. While this type of routing is common in JS frameworks there are several SEO reasons you may want content of different types to live within the same subfolder. (In our specific use case we wanted /senior-living/[!content!]/, /senior-living/[!facilities!]/, and /senior-living/[!experts!]/ to all live under /senior-living/. When you're planning on building a 100k page site over 5 years, early decisions matter. Especially for SEO as each permalink change adds a bit of 'drag.')
3. We found Sapper’s data flow hard to reason about for data driven and complex sites.

For data fetching Sapper uses a preload function to fetch a page’s initial props and build the page. This is done to enable client side routing and full client side hydration as this preload function is designed to run on both the client and the server.

This is a pretty cool feature for Apps but for a static SEO focused site it was overkill and cause huge problems with our dataflow when paired with the chosen routing system.

Elder.js solves these roadblocks.

1. Build times on our ~20k page site are routinely less than 10 minutes on a modest VM. In our analysis over 55% of our build time is spent waiting on the database server so you may see much faster builds. :)
2. You can setup the routes however you need. The only requirement is that you don’t have two routes with the same url. :) (We’ll tell you if is happens)
3. Every route defined has a single data function where you can do your database queries, read markdown files, and do whatever magic you need to prepare your data for display.

Adding Database Access

If your project is going to be querying its data from a database we recommend using the bootstrap hook and adding a connection to your database on the “query” property. See this hook example above.

Customizing the HTML 'shell'

In certain cases you may want to customize the shell that Elder.js writes the templateHtml and layoutHtml to.

Often a quick regex on the html hook is enough, but if you'd like completely control you can overwrite how Elder.js compiles the html by:

1. Add elderCompileHtml to the hooks.disable array in your elder.config.js.
2. Register a new function on the compileHtml hook and implement your desired functionality. (Look for elderCompileHtml in @elderjs/elderjs's hooks.ts file.)

Upgrading to v1.0.0:

Below are the breaking changes between v1 and earlier versions:

1. link helper is removed from templates. You can access it at helpers.permalinks the same way as before so link.blog({slug: "foo"}) becomes helpers.permalinks.blog({slug: "foo"})
2. routeHtml or routeHTML in the Layout.svelte in the Elder.js template has been changed to templateHtml. If your getting no output from your templates this is your issue. Rename this variable and things should work again.
3. The order of stacks and hook priorities have been reversed. This may cause hooks to run out of order. Please look at your hooks. Before this update, hooks with a priority of 1 where the highest priority, now they are the lowest.
4. process.browser replacements in rollup.config are now 'process.env.componentType' which will return browser or server. Remember process.env variables are strings. so process.env.componentType === 'server' is the correct way to check if a component is rendering on the server.
5. There was a major rework to the elder.config.js. If you defined anything in the elder.config.js under the locations key you'll need to rework those into the distDir, srcDir, and rootDir.
6. siteUrl in elder.config.js was changed to origin and you'll get an error if you don't set it.
7. Remove automatic checking for a tsconfig. If you want to use typescript, please set your srcDir to the build folder found in your tsconfig.

File / Hook Changes:

1. The ./src/assets/ folder has been moved to ./assets/ (project root).
2. You'll need to update your copyAssetsToPublic hook as shown below.
3. You'll need to update your rollup.config.js to be updated as shown below.

  // hooks.js
  // replace your old copyAssetsToPublic
  {
    hook: 'bootstrap',
    name: 'copyAssetsToPublic',
    description:
      'Copies /assets/ to the distDir folder defined in the elder.config.js. This function helps support the live reload process.',
    run: ({ settings }) => {
      // note that this function doesn't manipulate any props or return anything.
      // It is just executed on the 'bootstrap' hook which runs once when Elder.js is starting.

      // copy assets folder to public destination
      glob.sync(path.join(settings.rootDir, '/assets/**/*')).forEach((file) => {
        const parsed = path.parse(file);
        // Only write the file/folder structure if it has an extension
        if (parsed.ext && parsed.ext.length > 0) {
          const relativeToAssetsArray = parsed.dir.split('assets');
          relativeToAssetsArray.shift();

          const relativeToAssetsFolder = `.${relativeToAssetsArray.join()}/`;
          const p = path.parse(path.resolve(settings.distDir, relativeToAssetsFolder));
          fs.ensureDirSync(p.dir);
          fs.outputFileSync(
            path.resolve(settings.distDir, `${relativeToAssetsFolder}${parsed.base}`),
            fs.readFileSync(file),
          );
        }
      });
    },
  },

// replace your old rollup.config.js
const { getRollupConfig } = require("@elderjs/elderjs");
const svelteConfig = require("./svelte.config");

module.exports = [!getRollupConfig!];