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SERA integration on Node

Kindly follow the below examples to setup the routing of bot traffic to SERA.

Prerequisites

  • All your page requests must get intercepted by below SERA routing rule
    • Please check your routing, caching and cache-variation policies for that
  • If caching is enabled, Users and Bots should have a separate cache-variations configured. This is to not serve the SERA's bot-optimized-content to users.

Steps

  • Change SERA_ENDPOINT to the SERA endpoint shared with you
  • Change YOUR_TOKEN to the SERA token shared with you
  • Keep the relevant bot user-agent regex condition mentioned below - to control the traffic being sent to SERA
const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const port = 3000;


const seraEndpoint = 'SERA_ENDPOINT';
const seraToken = 'YOUR_TOKEN';
const n7AccessKey = 'N7_ACCESS_KEY';
//USE THIS - DURING POC PHASE for bot User-Agent regex :
const seraUserAgentPattern = /(n7TestUserAgent|google page speed|chrome-lighthouse|google-inspectiontool|PTST|GTmetrix)/i;
//USE THIS - ON GOING LIVE ON SERA for bot User-Agent regex :
//const seraUserAgentPattern = /(googlebot|n7TestUserAgent|google page speed|chrome-lighthouse|google-inspectiontool|PTST|GTmetrix)/i;
const seraExludeExtnPattern = /.+\.(ai|ashx|asmx|aspx|avi|avif|bmp|css|csv|dat|dmg|doc|eot|exe|flv|gif|ico|iso|jpeg|jpg|js|json|jsp|less|m4a|m4v|mov|mp3|mp4|mpeg|mpg|ogg|otf|pdf|php|png|ppt|psd|rar|rss|svg|swf|tif|torrent|ttf|txt|wav|webm|webp|wmv|woff|woff2|xls|xml|zip)(\?.*|&.*|$)/i;
const seraExludeQryPrmPattern = /\?(.*&)*(nsbp)=.*/i;
const seraExludePagePattern = /.*(\/static/|\/_next\/|\/api\/|\/login|\/logout|\/account\/|\/wishlist\/|\/cart\/|\/checkout\/|\/payment\/).*/i;

const sera = async (req, res, next) => {
    const { "user-agent": userAgent, "accept-encoding": acceptEncoding, accept, referer } = req.headers;

    if (req.method === "GET"
        && seraUserAgentPattern.test(userAgent) 
        && !seraExludeExtnPattern.test(req.url)
        && !seraExludeQryPrmPattern.test(req.url)
        && !seraExludePagePattern.test(req.url)
        && !req.headers['x-nv-app']
        && !req.headers['x-nv-sera-bypass']) {

        const headers = {
            'x-nv-sera-token': seraToken,
            'x-nv-access-key': n7AccessKey,
            'user-agent': userAgent || '',
            'accept-encoding': acceptEncoding || '',
            'accept': accept || '',
            'referer': referer || '',
        };

        const remoteUrl = `${seraEndpoint}${req.url.pathname}`; //USE THIS IF YOUR SITEMAP PAGE URLS DO NOT HAVE QUERYSTRING
        const remoteUrl = `${seraEndpoint}${req.url}`; //USE THIS IF YOUR SITEMAP PAGE URLS HAVE QUERYSTRING

        try {
            const response = await fetch(remoteUrl, { headers });
            if ((response.status === 200 || response.status === 410) && response.data) {
                res.status(response.status).send(response.data);
            }
            else {
                next();
            }
        } catch (error) {
            console.error('error downloading page:', error.message);
            next();
        }
    }
    else {
        next();
    }
}

app.use(sera);

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
    res.send('Hello World!')
})

app.listen(port, () => {
    console.log(`example app listening on port ${port}`)
})

Testing and Refinement

  • Keep refining the logic by adjusting user-agent list, and SERA exclusion-patterns as needed.

  • Test thoroughly:

    • WPT and GTMetrix will automatically receive the response from SERA due to the routing rule set above.

      • Steps to validate page using WPT
    • To check the SERA rendered page on browser, you can use DevTools > Network conditions facility, or some browser extension (like Simple modify headers) to manipulate the browser user-agent.
      If in testing phase, use these user-agent values:
      For desktop:

      n7TestUserAgent
      
      For mobile:
      n7TestUserAgent; Android
      
      If SERA is live, you can use these actual bot user-agent values:
      For desktop:
      Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +<http://www.google.com/bot.html)> Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
      
      For mobile:
      Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +<http://www.google.com/bot.html)>
      

  • On go-live day, set the user-agent condition regex to actual bot user-agent values. Additionally, ensure that your condition is case-insensitive.

  • Whitelist SERA requests at your origin to avoid any issues with indexing. Details are here

  • After go-live, in any dashboards created for monitoring the "actual user traffic" e.g. Google analytics, exclude the requests with user-agent string containing word "Nitrogen SERA" to get correct understanding about user-traffic.