Getting Started with Next JS
A simple guide for Next JS, a popular open-source React front-end web framework.
Next JS is a popular web framework built on top of React that provides out-of-the-box many hot features used in modern web development: static and server rendering, smart bundling, Typescripts support without a complex configuration.
Next JS - Open-Source React Framework.
To start using Next JS a minimal programming kit should be already installed with some of the tools:
Once we have this minimal set of tools, we can install Next JS using npm or Yarn.
$ npm install [email protected]
$ npm install [email protected] [email protected]
// OR
$ yarn add nextjs
$ yarn add [email protected] [email protected]
In this section, a simple Hello World project will be created using the console and a code editor.
Step #1 - Create project directory
$ mkdir hello-nextjs
$ cd hello-nextjs
Step #2 - Execute
npm init to generate package.json for our project with minimal information:$ npm init
This utility will walk you through creating a package.json file.
...
During the process, we can use the defaults for all questions. In the end,
npm will ask to confirm the information and the file is saved.Step #3 - Install dependencies
npm install next react react-dom
# OR
yarn add next react react-dom
Step #4 - Create a simple page
Next JS expects the React content in the
pages directory and our simple page is saved in this location.// pages/index.js
import React from "react";
export default () => ( < div > Hello Next JS! < /div>);
Step #5 - Added scripts to the
package.json file// Contents of package.json
...
"scripts": {
"test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1",
"dev": "next dev",
"build": "next build",
"start": "next start"
}
...
Once we have saved the file, we can start this simple open-page Next JS project:
$ yarn dev
The command will print a few messages in the terminal and serve the page on port
3000$ next dev
ready - started server on 0.0.0.0:3000, url: http://localhost:3000
event - compiled successfully
event - build page: /next/dist/pages/_error
wait - compiling...
event - compiled successfully
event - build page: /
wait - compiling...
By visiting the project in the browser, we should see our
Hello World message:Next JS - Hello World Sample
A Real Next JS Sample
Obviously, the above sample is pretty simple and minimal, just to make curious the audience. In this section is mentioned a production-ready Next JS sample released by Creative-Tim as an open-source project.
Next JS Material Kit is a Free Material Design Kit made for NextJS, React, and Material-UI. Next JS Material Kit is built with over 100 individual frontend elements, giving you the freedom of choosing and combining. All components can take variations in color, which you can easily modify using SASS and JSS (inside JS files) files and classes.
How to build the project
Step #2 - Change the current directory inside the project and install dependencies
$ npm install
// OR
$ yarn
Once the depenedencies are installed, we can start the project in development mode:
$ npm run dev
// OR
$ yarn dev
If all goes well, we should see the project running in the browser on port
3000 (the default port):Next JS - Material Kit Components.
Being a flexible framework, NextJS allows us to define special page handlers used globally across the project:
Custom "Document" used to augment your application's<html>and<body>tags.
To override the default
Document, and define properties like lang we need to create the file ./pages/_document.jsApp.jsallows us to wrap ALL pages in a special wrapper and use a persistent layout across all pages.
Using this special page, we can achieve with ease a few useful things:
- Layout persistence between page changes
- Use a global CSS
- Preserve the app state when navigating app pages
Custom error pages - 404/500 Error Handlers
Next JS provides a 404 error page by default but in the same time allows us to overwrite it via
pages/404.js file. The same thing we can do to handle with a custom page the 500 Error case.For more information regarding the Next JS customization, please access:
Last modified 2mo ago