Server-Side Rendering

For lower-level control over the rendering process, you can use the dioxus-ssr crate directly. This can be useful when integrating with a web framework that dioxus-fullstack does not support, or pre-rendering pages.

Setup

For this guide, we're going to show how to use Dioxus SSR with Axum.

Make sure you have Rust and Cargo installed, and then create a new project:

cargo new --bin demo
cd demo

Add Dioxus and the ssr renderer as dependencies:

cargo add dioxus
cargo add dioxus-ssr

Next, add all the Axum dependencies. This will be different if you're using a different Web Framework

cargo add tokio --features full
cargo add axum

Your dependencies should look roughly like this:

[dependencies]
axum = "0.4.5"
dioxus = { version = "*" }
dioxus-ssr = { version = "*" }
tokio = { version = "1.15.0", features = ["full"] }

Now, set up your Axum app to respond on an endpoint.

use axum::{response::Html, routing::get, Router};
use dioxus::prelude::*;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
	let addr = std::net::SocketAddr::from(([127, 0, 0, 1], 3000));
	println!("listening on http://{}", addr);

	axum::Server::bind(&addr)
		.serve(
			Router::new()
				.route("/", get(app_endpoint))
				.into_make_service(),
		)
		.await
		.unwrap();
}

And then add our endpoint. We can either render rsx! directly:

async fn app_endpoint() -> Html<String> {
	// render the rsx! macro to HTML
	Html(dioxus_ssr::render_lazy(rsx! {
		div { "hello world!" }
	}))
}

Or we can render VirtualDoms.

async fn app_endpoint() -> Html<String> {
	// create a component that renders a div with the text "hello world"
	fn app(cx: Scope) -> Element {
		cx.render(rsx!(div { "hello world" }))
	}
	// create a VirtualDom with the app component
	let mut app = VirtualDom::new(app);
	// rebuild the VirtualDom before rendering
	let _ = app.rebuild();

	// render the VirtualDom to HTML
	Html(dioxus_ssr::render_vdom(&app))
}

Multithreaded Support

The Dioxus VirtualDom, sadly, is not currently Send. Internally, we use quite a bit of interior mutability which is not thread-safe.Send, it is possible to render a VirtualDom immediately to a String – but you cannot hold the VirtualDom across an await point. For retained-state SSR (essentially LiveView), you'll need to spawn a VirtualDom on its own thread and communicate with it via channels or create a pool of VirtualDoms.must remain on the thread it started. We are working on loosening this requirement.