prerender-laravel

Laravel middleware for Prerender.io. Intercepts requests from bots and crawlers and serves prerendered HTML, so your JavaScript-rendered app is fully indexable by search engines and social media scrapers.

Compatible with Laravel 11+ and PHP 8.2+.

Installation

composer require prerender/laravel-prerender

Publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=prerender-config

Setup

Add your token to .env:

PRERENDER_TOKEN=your-token

The middleware registers itself automatically via the service provider.

Configuration

Key	Env var	Default	Description
enable	PRERENDER_ENABLE	true	Disable entirely (e.g. local dev)
prerender_url	PRERENDER_SERVICE_URL	https://service.prerender.io	Service URL (override for self-hosted)
prerender_token	PRERENDER_TOKEN	null	Your Prerender.io token
prerender_soft_http_codes	PRERENDER_SOFT_HTTP_STATUS_CODES	true	Pass 3xx/404 codes through as-is
full_url	PRERENDER_FULL_URL	false	Send full URL including query string
timeout	PRERENDER_TIMEOUT	0	Guzzle timeout in seconds (0 = none)

Whitelist / Blacklist

Only prerender URLs matching the whitelist (empty = all URLs pass):

'whitelist' => ['/blog/*', '/product/*'],

Never prerender URLs matching the blacklist (static assets are blacklisted by default):

'blacklist' => ['*.js', '*.css', '/admin/*'],

Patterns support * wildcards.

How it works

Requests are prerendered when all of the following are true:

• The HTTP method is GET
• The User-Agent matches a known bot/crawler (Googlebot, Bingbot, Twitterbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.)
  — OR the URL contains _escaped_fragment_
  — OR the X-BUFFERBOT header is present
• The URI is not blacklisted (static assets are excluded by default)
• The URI matches the whitelist (if configured)

If the Prerender service is unreachable, the middleware falls back gracefully.

License

MIT