preact-mpa-template

Example repo to start a multi-page app/website (MPA) with Preact, fastify and esbuild. If you don't need server side rendering (SSR) check preact-spa-template.

• 🐢 JS, CSS, image files are content hashed ("fingerprinted") on prod for long lived caching
• 🤵‍♂️ Fastify server (More performant than Express, can add HTTP/2 support)
• 🔄 Live reload
• ✂️ Shared code chunks / Code splitting (read esbuild docs for caveats)
• 🚀 Preload shared chunks
• 🗲 Preloads pages on mouse hover / touch start (using instant.page)
• 🌐 Static files deployable to S3 behind a CDN

# Dev
npm run dev

# Prod
npm run build
node server/server.js
# Don't use `npm run prod-debug` here as npm is known to swallow process signals
# Also --enable-source-maps is heavy, so use it cautiously

VSCode note: Install es6-string-html extension to syntax highlight HTML inside of JS template literals.

Structure

Example server uses a config file for mapping URL pattern to server handling function. Config file is at server/routes/routes.js. This gives full flexibility on how routes and URLs are handled.

Entry files to a page should placed in client/pages/{name}/{name}.page.jsx.

You will have to do at least a couple of things to production-ize this template:

1. You may not want to have a single preact context for the entire website. Each page having a separate context might be better.
2. Add HTTP/2 support.
3. Use a CDN for URL paths /public/* and /assets/* (on the same domain as the fastify server). Remove fastify compression and enable dynamic compression on the CDN. Optionally upload files from dist/public and assets directories to a file storage origin (like AWS S3) so that your main server doesn't have to serve static files (especially if your server is not auto-scaling or is constrained by bandwidth).
4. You might want a CSS solution like CSS modules or utility CSS (look into esbuild plugins for these)

Credits

Thanks to vite-plugin-ssr for some inspiration and example snippets, but I didn't use Vite here.