Render Pages Without Starting a Server

Use the scripts/render.rb tool to verify page rendering, extract HTML, or search content in rendered pages.

Basic Usage

The script accepts the database either as an argument or via RAILS_APP_DB environment variable:

# Pass database as argument
scripts/render.rb db/2025-alexandria-80-s-neon-nights.sqlite3 /people

# Or just the database name
scripts/render.rb 2025-alexandria-80-s-neon-nights /people

# Or use environment variable
RAILS_APP_DB=2025-alexandria-80-s-neon-nights scripts/render.rb /people

Common operations:

# Check if pages render successfully
scripts/render.rb 2025-alexandria-80-s-neon-nights --check /people /heats /solos

# Show summary with page sizes
scripts/render.rb 2025-alexandria-80-s-neon-nights /people /heats

# Get full HTML output (single page only)
scripts/render.rb 2025-alexandria-80-s-neon-nights --html /solos

# Search for specific content in rendered pages
scripts/render.rb 2025-alexandria-80-s-neon-nights --search "Solos" /solos

Script Options

• --check - Only check if page renders (exit 0 on success, 1 on failure)
• --html - Output full HTML content (works with single path only)
• --search TEXT - Search for specific text in rendered output
• --verbose, -v - Show detailed information
• --help, -h - Show help message

Common Workflows

1. Verify Pages Render Successfully

Test multiple pages at once and see their sizes:

scripts/render.rb db/DATABASE.sqlite3 /people /heats /solos

For CI/CD pipelines, use --check mode (silent, exit code indicates success):

scripts/render.rb db/DATABASE.sqlite3 --check /people /heats /solos
echo $?  # 0 = all succeeded, 1 = at least one failed

2. Search for Content in Rendered Pages

Verify specific content appears in a page:

scripts/render.rb db/DATABASE.sqlite3 --search "Rhythm Solos" /solos
# Output: ✓ /solos - 'Rhythm Solos' found

3. Extract HTML for Analysis

Save rendered HTML to a file for inspection:

scripts/render.rb db/DATABASE.sqlite3 --html /heats > heats.html

Advanced: Custom Scripts with Rails API

For complex custom logic, write a Ruby script using Rails' routing API directly:

# custom_test.rb
env = { "PATH_INFO" => '/heats', "REQUEST_METHOD" => "GET" }
code, headers, response = Rails.application.routes.call(env)

if code == 200
  html = response.body.force_encoding('utf-8')
  puts "Success: #{html.length} bytes"
else
  puts "Error: #{code}"
  exit 1
end

Run with bin/run db/DATABASE.sqlite3 custom_test.rb

See lib/tasks/prerender.rake for a production example of this technique.