[React] Create & Deploy a Universal React App using Zeit Next

In this lesson, we'll use next to create a universal React application with no configuration. We'll create page components that will render on the server if accessed directly, but function as you would expect in the client. We'll use the routing capabilities included with next to create links between the components using pushState and we'll incorporate our own React component. Finally, we'll deploy the application to now with a simple command in the terminal.

Setup:

npm init -y

Install:

npm i --save-dev next

Scripts:

  "scripts": {
    "dev": "next",
    "start": "next start",
    "build": "next build"
  },

Create pages/index.js file:

import React from 'react';

export default () => (
    <div>
        <h1>Hello next!!</h1>
    </div>
)

Run:

npm run dev

Then you can see the index.js page on the localhost:3000.

Add another page:

import React from 'react';

export default class About extends React.Component {

    static getInitialProps({req}) {
        const name = req ? 'server': 'client';
        return {
            name: name
        };
    }

    render() {
        return (
            <div>
                <h1>ABOUT PAGE</h1>
                <span>
                    This page is rendering from {this.props.name}
                </span>
            </div>
        );
    }
}

This can show whether the page is rendered from the server side or clinet side.

Create a nav component to do the rounting:

// compoennts/nav.js

import React from 'react';
import Link from 'next/link';

export default () => (
    <div>
        <Link href="/">Home</Link>
        {' '}
        <Link href="/about">About</Link>
    </div>
)

Then import to home page and about page.

// index.js

import React from 'react';
import Link from 'next/link';

import Nav from '../components/nav';

export default () => (
    <div>
        <h1>Hello next!!</h1>
        <Nav></Nav>
    </div>
)

Then we can create an .npmignore to ignore the .next folder in the root.

Last using 'now' to deploy the page to now.

Github