Getting Started with Next.js: A Beginner’s Guide

Next.js is a powerful framework designed to supercharge your web development journey. Built upon the widely popular React library, it offers a feature-rich environment for building both static and server-rendered applications. Let’s start this exciting exploration of this versatile tool and uncover its remarkable capabilities together. ✌️

Introduction

Next.js is a versatile React-based framework designed to simplify the development of both static and server-rendered applications. It offers server-side rendering out of the box, routing, code splitting and a host of other features that aid in developing robust and scalable web applications. Let’s delve into the world of Next.js. You can even write your endpoints with Nextjs and create full stack applications. We will get in to that topic in another article. Now let’s start learning Nestjs!

Installation

To create Nextjs applications you need to install Node.js and npm on your development environment. If you don’t have it on your local environment, you can follow the article below to use NVM to install Node and NPM

Install Node.js to Your Computer with NVM (Effortlessly Switch Between Node Versions)

Next, we can create a new Next.js application using Create Next App. Run the following command in your terminal:

npx create-next-app@latest my-next-app

Replace my-next-app with your preferred application name. The command will set up a new Next.js project in a directory with that name.

Next.js Project Structure

Once the project setup is complete, navigate into the directory. You’ll see that Next.js has created several files and directories. Let’s understand the key components:

• pages: The pages directory is the heart of Next.js applications. Every file corresponds to a route based on its name.
• public: It's for static files like images. They can be accessed via the root URL.
• styles: This directory contains global…