Server-Side Rendering of Lit Web Components in Drupal
Developers have found a way to render Lit Web Components on the server using Drupal, addressing concerns from frontend developers about the reliance on JavaScript. Benny Powers, the author of this proof-of-concept, demonstrates how to use a containerized service to compute the Shadow DOM of web components on the server. This is achieved through the Declarative Shadow DOM browser feature, enabling the internal HTML of web components to be included in the initial server response.
The approach involves creating a custom Drupal module that integrates into the post-processing pipeline, allowing custom elements to be rendered in Drupal pages, articles, and blocks. Despite the experimental nature of Lit's SSR implementation and its lack of support for context protocol, the solution provides a workable method for server-rendering web components. The project, which uses Koa for the server and Podman for containerization, aims to be a simple, reproducible setup for local development rather than a production-ready solution.

