Faust.js Framework Guide
Introduction
Faust is a JavaScript framework designed to make the development of headless WordPress sites as easy as possible for WordPress and JavaScript developers.
The mission of Faust is to reduce the complexity of building headless WordPress frontends for the web, allowing the developer to build production sites with the ease of a monolithic WordPress site.
Check out their documentation for guides to all these key features.
Deploy steps
To get started, you can run the following command to create a new Faust.js project and the follow the steps in their getting started guide:
npx create-next-app \ -e https://github.com/wpengine/faustjs/tree/main \ --example-path examples/next/faustwp-getting-started \ --use-npm
After you have created your application, cd into your project directory:
cd <your project directory>
Push Initial Commits to Your Repository
To deploy your project to our Headless Platform, it will need to be available on a remote GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab repository. The Faust.js installation process lets us initialize a local repository for the project.
Create a new remote repository, and then run the following commands to initialize and configure your local and remote repositories:
# Add remote repository
$ git remote add origin https://<your-git-provider>/<username>/<repo>
# Stage all changed files
$ git add -A
# Commit the files to the current branch
$ git commit -m "initial commit"
# Push changes to remote repository
$ git push -u origin mainDeploy Your Repository
Once your project is in your remote repository, you can follow the directions in our getting started guide to deploy your project to our Headless Platform.
Build Details
Our Headless Platform detects that it is a Faust.js app and runs the build scripts and configs necessary for the build details.
One thing to note is the next/cache folder within your Faust.js project. Our Headless Platform caches common framework assests between builds to optimise build times.
The build step will not override the folder.
Best Practices
Next Image in Faust.js
The Next.js Image component, next/image, is an extension of the HTML <img> element, evolved for the modern web. It includes a variety of built-in performance optimizations to help you achieve good Core Web Vitals.
Keep in mind that when you switch your domains to our Headless Platform, you must declare them in the next.js.config file, otherwise the images will not render.
Known Limitations
Incremental Static Regeneration
While our Node infrastructure will support either time-based or path-based (on-demand) revalidation of the primary Next.js instance, this revalidation will currently not extend to edge cached versions of that path, nor will they apply to all instances of your application if it has scaled beyond a single instance. Many customers are using ISR successfully, but it can lead to inconsistencies in certain cases.
This is under active investigation by our engineering team. If you need to perform a clean rebuild of your website, you can use the Clean Rebuild webhook or initiate one through the user portal.
Next Image caching with Faust
By default, Next Image serves up WebP versions of images to browsers that support it, and the AVIF format can also be delivered through configuration. While our Headless Platform supports the delivery of both of these formats, Cloudflare does not support the Vary header for paths without a file extension. Because of this, it is possible that if the WebP/AVIF version of a header is cached, that version may be served to browsers that cannot support such formats and could result in broken images for such users. The linked GitHub issue has a potential workaround, and we currently have a request in to Cloudflare to support such functionality.
Edge Runtime/Middleware
Because our Headless Platform does not rely on serverless functions/edge functions, such functionality currently runs on the origin Node server. It is important to note that this means that such functions will run only on requests that terminate at the origin; any requests served from the edge will continue to serve whatever response is cached at the edge for that path.
Visit the Faust.js documentationfor more in depth details on framework features.