# GoogleChrome/rendertron

A Headless Chrome rendering solution

Repository: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/rendertron
Homepage: https://render-tron.appspot.com/
Language: TypeScript
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: rendering, headless-chrome, seo, puppeteer, webcomponents, hacktoberfest
Archived: true
Last push: 2022-10-06T08:01:36+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3450, "days_push": 1427, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: archived
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 5953, forks 900 (observed 2026-08-28T04:09:33.633874+00:00)

## What it is
Rendertron is a standalone HTTP service that renders and serializes web pages on the fly using headless Chrome via Puppeteer, so bots that don't execute JavaScript receive fully rendered HTML. It includes middleware for frameworks like Express to route bot requests to the renderer, and supports screenshots and cache invalidation.

## Use cases
- serve fully rendered HTML to crawlers for SEO on a JavaScript SPA
- prerender pages for social media bots that don't run JavaScript
- render web components server-side for bots
- take screenshots of pages via an HTTP API
- proxy bot user-agent requests through middleware to a headless Chrome renderer

## When to choose
- you must support legacy bots that cannot execute JavaScript and cannot use modern rendering
- you need a self-hosted dynamic rendering service with Docker or Google Cloud deployment

## When to avoid
- starting a new project - the project is deprecated and dynamic rendering is no longer recommended by Google
- your site can use static generation or proper SSR instead
- you need actively maintained software with recent fixes

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: abandoned
- function: http-server, middleware, ssr, web-scraping, caching
- domain: web-development, frontend, self-hosted
- platform: self-hosted, cloud
- tags: headless-chrome, puppeteer, dynamic-rendering, bot-rendering, deprecated, web-components, pwa, seo, nodejs, docker, web-server

## Member repositories
- GoogleChrome/rendertron (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:33.633874+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T17:50:42.700116+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron (fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:33.633874+00:00, sha cea962c5eb05)
  - registry_npm: https://registry.npmjs.org/rendertron (fetched 2026-08-29T08:46:24.417573+00:00, sha 0f4fc2d2b917)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.