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Netlify & Next.js

Cassidy Williams has been doing a Blogvent (blogging every day for a month) over on the Netlify Blog. A lot of the blog posts are about Next.js. There is a lot to like about Next.js. I just pulled one of Cassidy’s starters for fun. It’s very nice that it has React Fast-Refresh built-in. I like how on any given “Page” you can import and use a <Head> to control stuff that would be in a <head>. This was my first tiny little play with Next so, excuse my basicness.

But the most compelling thing about Next.js, to me, is how easily it supports the entire rendering spectrum. It encourages you to do static-file rendering by default (smart), then if you need to do server-side rendering (SSR), you just update any given Page component to have this:

export async function getServerSideProps() { // Fetch data from external API const res = await fetch(`https://.../data`) const data = await res.json() // Pass data to the page via props return { props: { data } }
}

The assumption is that you’re doing SSR because you need to hit a server for data in order to render the page, but would prefer to do that server-side so that the page can render quickly and without JavaScript if needed (great for SEO). That assumes a Node server is sitting there ready to do that work. On Netlify, that means a function (Node Lambda), but you barely even have to think about it, because you just put this in your netlify.toml file:

[[plugins]] package = "@netlify/plugin-nextjs"

Now you’ve got static where you need it, server-rendered where you need it, but you aren’t giving up on client-side rendering either, which is nice and fast after the site is all booted up. I think it shoots some JSON around or something, framework magic.

I set up a quick SSR route off my homepage to have a play, and I can clearly see that both my homepage (static) and /cool route (SSR) both return static HTML on load.

I even had to prettify this source, as you HTML minification out of the box

I admit I like working in React, and Next.js is a darn nice framework to do it with because of the balance of simplicity and power. It’s great it runs on Netlify so easily.

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