Jan VarhoAfter my foray into serveless-nextjs I happily used it for personal projects for the last few years. However, Next.js moves fast and the project seems to have stalled, so I had to look into alternatives.
I've already used Cloudflare as a CDN and domain host, so I was happy to find Next-on-pages, which is a way to run Next.js serverlessly on Cloudflare Pages.
Setting up a new test project is easy, using the guide and specifically just running:
npm create cloudflare@latest test-app -- --framework=next
The interactive questions take are of everything and result in a nice development experience.
However, porting an existing site/app was a bit more of a hassle.
First I had to upgrade to the latest next.js release, since the one I'd been using with sls-next was too old. Luckily there wasn't anything too bad.
Next step was replacing sls with @cloudflare/next-on-pages, rewriting next.config.js and changing the runtime from serverless to edge. The last was a bit confusing, since documentation never spelled out how different things are between the app and pages routers:
The only way I managed to make work was using:
export const runtime = 'experimental-edge'
On every page.
After many an invocation of npx @cloudflare/next-on-pages I managed to make everything build. (Note! You need a "build" command in package.json which only runs next build, mine was left over from sls-next and did... other things.) Deploying was easy using Cloudflare Dashboard
Once everything was provisionally working I of course wanted to use all the new features from next.js so it was another porting operation from pages/ to app/. Luckily that's reasonably well documented.
All in all my experience is so far positive. Deployments are especially pleasant: every git push is built and deployed to a temporary url and a bot posts status reports and links to pull requests.
OTOH: next.js caching is increasingly confusing with all the new features.
Github link: insta-api v1.0.0
Github link: pylibscrypt v2.0.0
Recently I've mostly used React for front end development, but also used the serverless framework quite extensively for back end, API and event based flows. So finding Serverless Next.js was nice.
It's a serverless component which makes deploying a Next.js application to AWS CloudFront/S3/Lambda a piece of cake. No servers, no instances, no fixed costs beyond data storage. So I ported a couple of sites I manage outside work (including this one) over and liked it very much.
Getting started is as easy as running create-next-app and creating a two-line serverless.yml file.
There were a few minor issues I ran into and had to file some bug reports and pull requests for, but those were corner cases due to my specific requirements. Definitely something I am planning to use going forward.
Github link: pylibscrypt v1.8.0