I’m experiencing issues with Server-Side Rendering (SSR) in a fresh Laravel 12 installation using the React starter kit. Despite following the documentation, the page continues to render client-side (CSR) instead of server-side.
Setup:
- Laravel 12 (fresh installation)
- Inertia.js with React starter kit
- Node.js 22
- Running composer dev:ssr (Vite SSR server starts on port 13714)
Problem:
- SSR build completes without errors (resources/js/ssr.tsx)
- Inertia SSR server runs on port 13714
- Browser still shows CSR behavior (no server-rendered markup)
Same issue occurs in production with:
- PM2 running php artisan inertia:start-ssr (tried also “node bootstrap/ssr/ssr.js”)
Server should return fully rendered HTML on initial page load.
How can I debug why SSR isn’t taking effect? Are there additional configuration steps I might be missing for Laravel 12?