You have a SPA and you want to put dynamic information (most likely from an API call) in HTML meta tags, so that when you share a particular link from your SPA website on some social media, it displays all the relevant information.
- A browser requests your single page application from the server, which is going to be loaded from a single index.html file.
- You program some intermediary server code which intercepts the client request and differentiates whether the request came from a browser or some social media bot.
- If the request came from some social media bot, make an API call to your back-end server, gather the data you need, fill in that data to html meta tags and return those tags in string format back to the client.
- If the request didn't come from some social media bot, then simply return the index.html file from the build folder of your single page application.
yarn install && node index.js
This will install your Node dependencies and start a local Node server at port 9999.
I've already build some files from a simple Vue.js app in the dist
folder. Or you can simply use your own.
Link to the sample Vue.js app can be found here
- Go to
localhost:9999
in your browser and you will see your SPA load. - To see if the SEO actually works, you don't need an actual node.js server you can just fire up a ngrok server that you can download from here
- Click on one of the tv shows and copy/paste the ngrok generated url (e.g: 'your_ngrok_url/tvshow/2') in your twitter/linkedin post or slack/discord channel
- Working link for this project on
Cyclic.sh
can be found here - And Voila! you should all the relevant details in your post.
- Login/Signup to
ngrok.com
and copy yourauthtoken
fromhttps://dashboard.ngrok.com/get-started/setup
and paste it in your ngrok terminal like so./ngrok authtoken your_ngrok_token
- Then type
ngrok http 9999 -host-header="localhost:9999"
in the ngrok terminal. This command will expose your local server to a public url. - Copy/Paste the url generated by ngrok terminal in your browser and you should see your SPA load.