Django 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 Django 5+ and Python 3.10+.

Installation

pip install prerender-django

Setup

Add the middleware to your settings.py:

MIDDLEWARE = [
    'prerender_django.middleware.PrerenderMiddleware',
    # ... your other middleware
]
PRERENDER_TOKEN = 'YOUR_PRERENDER_TOKEN'

The middleware must be placed before any session or authentication middleware to intercept bot requests early.

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
`PRERENDER_TOKEN`	`None`	Your Prerender.io token
`PRERENDER_SERVICE_URL`	`https://service.prerender.io/`	Prerender service URL (use this for self-hosted Prerender)

Self-hosted Prerender

PRERENDER_SERVICE_URL = 'http://your-prerender-server:3000'

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 URL does not end with a static asset extension (.js, .css, .png, etc.)

Everything else passes through to your normal Django views.

If the Prerender service is unreachable, the middleware falls back gracefully and serves the normal response.

License

MIT