feat: possibility to render directly to stdout and render cli command

[jrutila]

🔗 Linked issue

2466

❓ Type of change

• [ ] 📖 Documentation (updates to the documentation, readme, or JSdoc annotations)
• [ ] 🐞 Bug fix (a non-breaking change that fixes an issue)
• [ ] 👌 Enhancement (improving an existing functionality like performance)
• [x] ✨ New feature (a non-breaking change that adds functionality)
• [ ] 🧹 Chore (updates to the build process or auxiliary tools and libraries)
• [ ] ⚠️ Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)

📚 Description

Added a new option to nitro.prerender called stdout (default: false). When that option is set, the routes are generated to console output instead of written to files.

Added a new command line tool called render that will render a single given route. It can have an option --stdout and then it will output the route to console.

📝 Checklist

• [x] I have linked an issue or discussion.
• [x] I have updated the documentation accordingly.

[jrutila]

You can test this feature like this:

• Add a route to playground/routes/, for example abba.ts that has this

  export default eventHandler(async (event) => {
  return "AbbA";
  });

• run pnpm nitro build --dir playground to first build the playground
• run pnpm nitro render --dir playground --stdout abba
• you should now see "AbbA" in the output of the previous render command

[jrutila]

Is there possibility to get this forward? It will fall behind the main, again. Please let me know if something else is needed to get it merged.

[pi0]

Hi dear @jrutila thanks for your pull request and sorry for late review. I really appreciate it. ❤️

I cannot accept it as-is for some reasons:

• Nitro has already a CLI preset intended for same thing (standalone output that can render to stdout without depending in nitro builder core) -- PR welcome to improve it
• Before thinking about considering a new sub-command like this, we need to implement a smart rebuild functionality that avoid nitro rebuild if source has not been changed to avoid extra rebuilds otherwise it will be an impractical feature
• This feature should also be possible with programmatic API (prerenderRoute()) to be usable with other meta frameworks used in conjunction with nitro

For maintenance i am closing this PR (for now) let's keep tracking about the idea via #2466 i definitely love to work on this in the future and i guess same functionality can be implemented outside of nitro source tree to experiment with if you need it.