Next.js: The Starter Guide

Next.js: The Complete Guide

Next.js is a popular React framework that provides a great developer experience for building server-rendered React applications. It allows developers to create modern web applications with ease, while also providing built-in optimizations for better performance and SEO.

In this article, we'll cover the basics of Next.js, including setting up a project, creating pages, and deploying a Next.js application.

Getting Started with Next.js

To get started with Next.js, you'll need to have Node.js and npm installed on your machine. Once you have those installed, you can create a new Next.js project by running the following command in your terminal:

npx create-next-app my-app

This will create a new directory called my-app with all the necessary files to get started with Next.js.

Creating Pages

One of the main features of Next.js is its automatic page routing. To create a new page in your application, all you need to do is create a new file in the pages directory.

For example, if you want to create a page at the URL /about, you would create a file called about.js in the pages directory. Here's an example of what that file might look like:

import React from 'react';

const AboutPage = () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>About Us</h1>
      <p>We are a team of developers building cool stuff with Next.js!</p>
    </div>
  );
};

export default AboutPage;

This file defines a simple React component that will be rendered when the user navigates to the /about URL. Notice that we're exporting the component as the default export.

Routing and Navigation

Next.js provides automatic client-side navigation between pages using the Link component from the next/link module. Here's an example of how to use it:

import Link from 'next/link';

const HomePage = () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Welcome to my app</h1>
      <Link href="/about">
        <a>About us</a>
      </Link>
    </div>
  );
};

export default HomePage;

This code creates a link to the /about page using the Link component. When the user clicks on the link, Next.js will handle the navigation client-side without triggering a full page reload.

Server-Side Rendering

Next.js allows you to perform server-side rendering of your pages for improved performance and SEO. To do this, you simply need to export a getServerSideProps function from your page component.

Here's an example of how to use getServerSideProps:

import React from 'react';

const HomePage = ({ data }) => {
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Welcome to my app</h1>
      <p>{data}</p>
    </div>
  );
};

export const getServerSideProps = async () => {
  const res = await fetch('https://api.example.com/data');
  const data = await res.json();

  return { props: { data } };
};

export default HomePage;

This code defines a getServerSideProps function that fetches some data from an external API and passes it to the HomePage component as a prop. When the page is loaded, Next.js will call this function on the server and render the page with the data.

Deploying Your Next.js App

Once you've built your Next.js application, you'll need to deploy it to a web server so that it can be accessed by users. There are many options for deploying a Next.js application.