andrewbrey / remix-curl

A demo of using Remix to send different responses depending on if the client is a browser or curl

Remix Curl Demo

This is demo of how you can use the fact that Remix provides you with a real server to send one response to web browsers and another response to a curl client.

Demo

This demo is deployed to Vercel and can be viewed in a web browser at https://remix-curl.vercel.app/

Alternatively, you can curl this same url with:

curl --silent https://remix-curl.vercel.app

to see how this site sends a completely different response to curl, and in fact, the response to curl takes advantage of the fact that it's being called from a terminal and the plaintext response includes ansi style escape codes so that you get a pretty output in the terminal just like you do in the browser!

Notes

• As of this writing (April 5th, 2022), Remix doesn't support configuring esbuild with custom external modules (may be fixed if they merge remix-run/remix#1841). Unfortunately in addition to this, the external modules declared internally by Remix are the Node built-ins (process, fs, etc) but only those without the node: specifier prefix, which means any 3rd party dependency that references e.g. node:process (or any other Node built-in via its node: prefixed specifier) will cause a build error.

  Since I wanted to use the boxen module by @sindresorhus in the curl response text, and this module references node:process, I needed to use patch-package as a quick way to ensure that the un-prefixed Node built-in was being referenced by boxen.

  If at some point either:

  • Remix includes both node: prefixed and unprefixed Node built-ins in their list of external modules for esbuild, OR
  • Remix allows users to supply their own external module list via configuration

  then this use of patch-package can go away.

See Also

https://blog.andrewbrey.com/2022-04-05-building-a-curl-able-developer-resume-site-with-remix