nextjs-starter

Stack

• React.js: Front-end
• Next.js: API routes and server-side rendering
• MongoDB: Permanently storing info
• iron-session: Authentication session handling for SSR/SSG
• eslint: Automatically identifying and fixing code errors
• prettier: Setting a common code style and fixing any issues. If you would like to adjust any prettier settings like quote style or include semicolons, look in .prettierrc
• yarn: Package management. If you do not have yarn, run npm install -g yarn to install yarn globally.

Setup

Initializing Env Vars

• If you are an EM setting up a project for the first time, read the Bitwarden guide here before continuing forward.
• Run yarn secrets to sync development secrets from Bitwarden and save them to a local .env.local file. Contact a leadership member for the Bitwarden password.
  • Note: If you are using Windows, enter yarn secrets:login and then yarn secrets:sync instead of the above script.

Updating Env Vars

• For dev, update .env.local and next.config.js
• For production, add the env vars to your host, NEVER commit .env.local to your version control system.

MongoDB

A running instance of MongoDB is required this project.

• Decide if you want to run MongoDB locally or remotely
• Locally (Docker (RECOMMENDED))
  1. Download Docker Desktop
  2. Run docker run --name mongodb -d -p 27017:27017 mongo in your terminal
  3. Open Docker Desktop and confirm that your MongoDB image is running. It should exist on port 27017, and can be accessed.
• Locally (Non-Docker)
  1. Download MongoDB Community Server
  2. Go through the installation instructions.
     • Leave the port at default 27017
• Remotely
  1. Create a MongoDB instance on MongoDB Atlas
  2. In Security → Network Access: add the IP address 0.0.0.0/0 (all IPs)
  3. In Security → Database Access: Add new database user
  4. In Data Storage → Clusters: Find your cluster and click Connect → Connect your application and copy the connection string, set the username and password, and set this as MONGO_DB in .env.local
• Create the nextjs database. (or choose another name, but make sure to change it in .env.local)
• It's very helpful to install MongoDB Compass to see your database contents

Node

1. Clone this project to your computer
2. Navigate to this project in terminal and enter yarn
3. Rename example.env to .env.local and fill it out with the dev config

Running

Development

To understand this code better, read the Code Tour.

1. Run yarn
2. Run yarn dev

Production

1. Setup your host/vm and the necessary env vars
2. Run yarn install
3. Run yarn start

Other Info

Styling

• This is dated info. We are on Next 11 now.
• By default, this repository uses Next ^9.2.0 for styles, which includes native support for global CSS and CSS modules
• However, this version only allows global css to be in pages/_app.js, which can cause issues with external packages
• If you face this error, the solution is installing @zeit/next-css and adding it to next.config.js, however you cannot use css modules and global css together with this package (and it defaults to global).

Deployment

This repository has a Vercel CD pipeline set up in the main.yml workflow. For first time set up, run npx vercel after installing all packages. This will trigger the Vercel CLI and deploy the repository onto Vercel.

Once the repository has been deployed for the first time, three secrets must be loaded into GitHub: ORG_ID, PROJECT_ID, and VERCEL_TOKEN. The first two can be found within the project.json file within the .vercel folder, generated by the Vercel CLI. The third VERCEL_TOKEN can be found under your Vercel account on the Vercel website.

Having configured these values, this repository will generate a Vercel deployment for every PR/push into the main or production branches. Three GitHub deployment environments are used: Production (for pushes to production), Preview (for pushes to open PRs into main or production), and Development (for pushes to main).

There exists a more detailed guide regarding deployment on the Bits of Good Notion (must be a member of BoG to access).