rendertron

Set up Rendertron with Apache

To use Rendertron with Apache, set up a conditional URL rewrite based on the user agent. You can do this either in an .htaccess file, the VirtualHost configuration or the main configuration file.

Prerequisites

Your Apache needs to have mod_rewrite and mod_proxy_http enabled for this configuration. On Debian and Ubuntu, run these commands to activate these modules:

sudo a2enmod rewrite proxy_http
sudo service apache2 restart

Basic configuration

Use the following configuration to send all requests from user agents containing bot to Rendertron:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} bot
# Replace the PUT-YOUR-RENDERTRON-URL-HERE with the URL of your Rendertron instance
# Replace YOUR-WEBAPP-ROOT-URL with the base URL of your web application (e.g. example.com)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://PUT-YOUR-RENDERTRON-URL-HERE/render/https://YOUR-WEBAPP-ROOT-URL$1 [P,L]

Sending multiple bot user agents to Rendertron

To make your Apache web server send requests from a list of bots to your Rendertron instance, use this syntax:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} facebookexternalhit|linkedinbot|twitterbot
# Replace the PUT-YOUR-RENDERTRON-URL-HERE with the URL of your Rendertron instance
# Replace YOUR-WEBAPP-ROOT-URL with the base URL of your web application (e.g. example.com)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://PUT-YOUR-RENDERTRON-URL-HERE/render/https://YOUR-WEBAPP-ROOT-URL$1 [P,L]

Separate the bot names with the pipe (|) character. This configuration is case-sensitive, so googlebot works while Googlebot doesn’t.

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