Package Exports

react-helmet-async
react-helmet-async/lib/index.esm.js
react-helmet-async/lib/index.js
react-helmet-async/package
react-helmet-async/package.json

This package does not declare an exports field, so the exports above have been automatically detected and optimized by JSPM instead. If any package subpath is missing, it is recommended to post an issue to the original package (react-helmet-async) to support the "exports" field. If that is not possible, create a JSPM override to customize the exports field for this package.

Readme

react-helmet-async

Announcement post on Times Open blog

This package is a fork of React Helmet. <Helmet> usage is synonymous, but server and client now requires <HelmetProvider> to encapsulate state per request.

react-helmet relies on react-side-effect, which is not thread-safe. If you are doing anything asynchronous on the server, you need Helmet to encapsulate data on a per-request basis, this package does just that.

Usage

New is 1.0.0: No more default export! import { Helmet } from 'react-helmet-async'

The main way that this package differs from react-helmet is that it requires using a Provider to encapsulate Helmet state for your React tree. If you use libraries like Redux or Apollo, you are already familiar with this paradigm:

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import { Helmet, HelmetProvider } from 'react-helmet-async';

const app = (
  <HelmetProvider>
    <App>
      <Helmet>
        <title>Hello World</title>
        <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.tacobell.com/" />
      </Helmet>
      <h1>Hello World</h1>
    </App>
  </HelmetProvider>
);

ReactDOM.hydrate(
  app,
  document.getElementById(‘app’)
);

On the server, we will no longer use static methods to extract state. react-side-effect exposed a .rewind() method, which Helmet used when calling Helmet.renderStatic(). Instead, we are going to pass a context prop to HelmetProvider, which will hold our state specific to each request.

import React from 'react';
import { renderToString } from 'react-dom/server';
import { Helmet, HelmetProvider } from 'react-helmet-async';

const helmetContext = {};

const app = (
  <HelmetProvider context={helmetContext}>
    <App>
      <Helmet>
        <title>Hello World</title>
        <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.tacobell.com/" />
      </Helmet>
      <h1>Hello World</h1>
    </App>
  </HelmetProvider>
);

const html = renderToString(app);

const { helmet } = helmetContext;

// helmet.title.toString() etc…

Streams

This package only works with streaming if your <head> data is output outside of renderToNodeStream(). This is possible if your data hydration method already parses your React tree. Example:

import through from 'through';
import { renderToNodeStream } from 'react-dom/server';
import { getDataFromTree } from 'react-apollo';
import { Helmet, HelmetProvider } from 'react-helmet-async';
import template from 'server/template';

const helmetContext = {};

const app = (
  <HelmetProvider context={helmetContext}>
    <App>
      <Helmet>
        <title>Hello World</title>
        <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.tacobell.com/" />
      </Helmet>
      <h1>Hello World</h1>
    </App>
  </HelmetProvider>
);

await getDataFromTree(app);

const [header, footer] = template({
  helmet: helmetContext.helmet,
});

res.status(200);
res.write(header);
renderToNodeStream(app)
  .pipe(
    through(
      function write(data) {
        this.queue(data);
      },
      function end() {
        this.queue(footer);
        this.queue(null);
      }
    )
  )
  .pipe(res);

Usage in Jest

While testing in using jest, if there is a need to emulate SSR, the following string is required to have the test behave the way they are expected to.

import { HelmetProvider } from 'react-helmet-async';

HelmetProvider.canUseDOM = false;

Prioritizing tags for SEO

It is understood that in some cases for SEO, certain tags should appear earlier in the HEAD. Using the prioritizeSeoTags flag on any <Helmet> component allows the server render of react-helmet-async to expose a method for prioritizing relevant SEO tags.

In the component:

<Helmet prioritizeSeoTags>
  <title>A fancy webpage</title>
  <link rel="notImportant" href="https://www.chipotle.com" />
  <meta name="whatever" value="notImportant" />
  <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.tacobell.com" />
  <meta property="og:title" content="A very important title"/>
</Helmet>

In your server template:

<html>
  <head>
    ${helmet.title.toString()}
    ${helmet.priority.toString()}
    ${helmet.meta.toString()}
    ${helmet.link.toString()}
    ${helmet.script.toString()}
  </head>
  ...
</html>

Will result in:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>A fancy webpage</title>
    <meta property="og:title" content="A very important title"/>
    <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.tacobell.com" />
    <meta name="whatever" value="notImportant" />
    <link rel="notImportant" href="https://www.chipotle.com" />
  </head>
  ...
</html>

A list of prioritized tags and attributes can be found in constants.ts.

Usage without Context

You can optionally use <Helmet> outside a context by manually creating a stateful HelmetData instance, and passing that stateful object to each <Helmet> instance:

import React from 'react';
import { renderToString } from 'react-dom/server';
import { Helmet, HelmetProvider, HelmetData } from 'react-helmet-async';

const helmetData = new HelmetData({});

const app = (
    <App>
      <Helmet helmetData={helmetData}>
        <title>Hello World</title>
        <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.tacobell.com/" />
      </Helmet>
      <h1>Hello World</h1>
    </App>
);

const html = renderToString(app);

const { helmet } = helmetData.context;