Laravel Inertia.js - Running SSR on a different port than 13714

I am getting into Inertia.js and so far love it for its simplicity and the huge advantages it brings for building a modern website on a modern stack driven by both frontend awesomeness with a Javascript framework of your choice and the power of Laravel and PHP in the backend.

One of my main concerns was whether Inertia would be a good solution in terms of SEO. Turns out: it is! 🎉 With its inbuilt SSR capabilities, it is a breeze to setup a completely server-side rendered, SEO friendly frontend that still profits from all the Inertia magic.

Setting SSR up is well documented and easy to do. When everything is setup, running

php artisan inertia:start-ssr

will start the SSR server and Laravel will give you plain HTML with all the client side features still working. But: it will always run the SSR server on port 13714 and I couldn't find any existing resource showing how to change that.

Changing the default SSR port

There might me multiple reasons to change the port. Some examples:

• The port is already taken. This is not very likely when running only one website on a server (or locally), but as soon as you have two projects running, the runners would conflict each other.
• The port is forbidden. Some hosters will not allow you to assign any port outside of a given range.
• You don't like the number. Also unlikely, but maybe you are just not a fan of numbers starting with a 13.

Changing the port to something else takes two steps. You'll need to

• reconfigure the SSR build to make the SSR server run on the desired port and
• change the Laravel runtime config so that the Laravel runtime talks to the SSR server on the correct port.

This is (as far as I know) not documented and I had to dive into the sourcecode for both the inertia server runner and the Laravel command to start the server to understand what is going on. Here we go.

Changing the port for the SSR build

Step 1: Given that you have followed the SSR setup guide, when running

npm run build

the configuration is baked into the bundle that will be executed when starting the SSR server (you can find this bundle at bootstrap/ssr/ssr.js). By default, no port is passed in, so the default port is used.

In order to change what port will be used later, this has to be changed in your resources/js/ssr.js file. The port can be changed by passing it as a second parameter to the createServer function. So

createServer(page =>
  createInertiaApp({
    page,
    render: renderToString,
    resolve: name => {
      const pages = import.meta.glob('./Pages/**/*.vue', { eager: true })
      return pages[`./Pages/${name}.vue`]
    },
    setup({ App, props, plugin }) {
      return createSSRApp({
        render: () => h(App, props),
      }).use(plugin)
    },
  }),
  8080
)

The change in regards to the defaults here is the last line. I'm passing in the port as a second parameter. With this setup, run npm run build again and the next time you run php artisan inertia:start-ssr you will see:

Starting SSR server on port 8080...
Inertia SSR server started.

Awesome. But: This change alone will not do. Laravel will still try to talk to the SSR server on port 13714. Let's change this.

Changing the port for the Laravel backend

The laravel inertia adapter has a configuration file that is not published by default. If you didn't do this yet, run

php artisan vendor:publish --provider "Inertia\ServiceProvider"

This will publish a file named inertia.php to your config folder. Open this and voilà, there you can change the SSR server url that Laravel is talking to. Change the URL to

'url' => 'http://127.0.0.1:8080',

and you are all set. 🚀

Making the port easier to configure

Changing the port in two places seems a bit tedious, also this port should be depending on your environment. So let's make it an environment variable.

In your config/inertia.php, change this line

'url' => 'http://127.0.0.1:8080',

to

'url' => 'http://127.0.0.1:'.env('VITE_INERTIA_SSR_PORT', 13714),

And in your ssr.js, instead of hardcoding the port also inject the env variable.

createServer(page =>
  createInertiaApp({
    // config here...
  }),
  process.env.VITE_INERTIA_SSR_PORT || 13714
)

With both changes in place, you can now add the VITE_INERTIA_SSR_PORT variable to your .env file and set it there.

VITE_INERTIA_SSR_PORT=8080

Notes

• Yes, the VITE_ prefix for the env variable name is obligatory in order to make it available to the ssr.js.
• Keep in mind that the port for the SSR server is still baked into the build bundle when running npm run build. Just changing the env variable will not change the port the server is running on if you do not recreate the bundle.
• Yes, this should be documented somewhere. If you have the power to add it to the docs, do so.

Comments

[Harry]

Thank you much. I needed this.

[Stefano]

Thanks!