README

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

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. Blacklist patterns are matched with the query string stripped, so *.woff2 also matches /font.woff2?v=3.

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