Renderful

Welcome! Renderful is a rendering engine for headless CMSs. It allows you to map your content types to Ruby objects that take care of rendering your content.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'renderful'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install renderful

Once you have installed the gem, you can configure it like this:

RenderfulClient = Renderful::Client.new(
  provider: Renderful::Provider::DummyCms.new(api_key: 'secretApiKey'), # see "Providers"
  components: {
    'jumbotron' => JumbotronComponent,
  },
)

Usage

Suppose you have the jumbotron content type in your Contentful space. This content type has the title and content fields, both strings.

Let's create the app/components/jumbotron_component.rb file:

class JumbotronComponent < Renderful::Component
  def render
    <<~HTML
      <div class="jumbotron">
        <h1 class="display-4">#{ entry.title }</h1>
        <p class="lead">#{ entry.content }</p>
      </div>
    HTML
  end
end

You can now render the component like this:

RenderfulClient.render('my_entry_id')

Caching

You can easily cache the output of your components. A Redis cache implementation is included out of the box. Here's an example:

RenderfulClient = Renderful.new(
  cache: Renderful::Cache::Redis.new(Redis.new(url: 'redis://localhost:6379')),
  # ...
)

If you are using Rails and want to use the Rails cache store for Renderful, you can simply pass Rails.cache, which responds to the expected interface:

RenderfulClient = Renderful.new(ful,
  cache: Rails.cache,
  # ...
)

Cache invalidation

The best way to invalidate the cache is through webhooks.

Renderful ships with a framework-agnostic webhook processor you can use to automatically invalidate the cache for all updated content:

RenderfulClient.invalidate_cache_from_webhook(json_body)

This is how you could use it in a Rails controller:

class WebhooksController < ApplicationController
  skip_before_action :verify_authenticity_token

  def create
    RenderfulClient.invalidate_cache_from_webhook(request.raw_post)
    head :no_content
  end
end

The cache invalidator will not only invalidate the cache for the entry that has been updated, but also for any entries linking to it, so that they are re-rendered. This is very useful, for instance, if you have a Page entry type that contains references to many UI components - when one of the components is updated, you want the page to be re-rendered.

ViewComponent support

Renderful integrates nicely with ViewComponent for rendering your components:

RenderfulClient = Renderful::Client.new(
  components: {
    'jumbotron' => JumbotronComponent, # JumbotronComponent inherits from ViewComponent::Base
  },
)

However, keep in mind you will now have to pass a view context when rendering them:

RenderfulClient.render('my_entry_id', view_context: view_context)

Providers

Contentful

In order to integrate with Contentful, you will first need to add the contentful gem to your Gemfile:

gem 'contentful'

Now make sure to install it:

$ bundle install

Finally, initialize Renderful with the Contentful provider:

RenderfulClient = Renderful::Client.new(
  provider: Renderful::Provider::Contentful.new(
    contentful: Contentful::Client.new(
      space: 'cfexampleapi',
      access_token: 'b4c0n73n7fu1',
    )
  )
)

You can now render your Contentful entries via Renderful:

RenderfulClient.render('your_entry_id')

Prismic

In order to integrate with Prismic, you will first need to add the prismic.io gem to your Gemfile:

gem 'prismic.io', require: 'prismic'

Now make sure to install it:

$ bundle install

Finally, initialize Renderful with the Prismic provider:

RenderfulClient = Renderful::Client.new(
  provider: Renderful::Provider::Prismic.new(
    prismic: Prismic.api('https://yourendpoint.prismic.io/api', 'your_access_token')
  )
)

You can now render your Prismic documents via Renderful:

RenderfulClient.render('your_entry_id')

NOTE: Due to limitations in Prismic's API, cache invalidation for Prismic will invalidate all your components. Depending on how often you update your content, you may want to disable caching entirely if you are using Prismic.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/nebulab/renderful.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Credits

Renderful was originally developed by Nebulab and sponsored by Bolt Threads. It is currently maintained by Nebulab.