Building a Blog with Next.js and Strapi

In this tutorial, we will show you how to build a blog using Next.js, a popular React framework, and Strapi, a headless CMS. With Next.js, you can create powerful and dynamic web applications, while Strapi provides a flexible and easy-to-use content management system.

Prerequisites

Before we get started, make sure you have the following installed:

1. Node.js
2. npm or yarn
3. Next.js and create-next-app
4. Strapi

Setting up Strapi

First, we need to set up our Strapi CMS. You can install Strapi with npm by running the following command:

npm install strapi@beta -g

After installing Strapi, create a new project by running:

strapi new my-blog

Follow the on-screen instructions to set up your project. Once your project is set up, you can start the Strapi server by running:

npm run develop

Creating Content Types

In Strapi, you can define content types for your blog. For example, you can create a “Post” content type with fields like title, content, author, and date. You can also create relationships between content types, such as a relationship between a post and its author.

Setting up Next.js

Now that our Strapi CMS is set up, we can start building our Next.js blog. First, create a new Next.js app using the create-next-app command:

npx create-next-app my-blog

Once your Next.js app is created, you can start the development server by running:

npm run dev

Connecting Next.js with Strapi

To connect Next.js with Strapi, we can use a library like axios to make API requests to our Strapi backend. You can create a service file to handle these requests and fetch the data from Strapi.

Displaying Content

Once we have connected Next.js with Strapi, we can start displaying our blog content. We can create pages to display individual blog posts, a list of all blog posts, and any other pages we may need for our blog.

Conclusion

By combining Next.js with Strapi, we have created a powerful and flexible blog. Next.js provides a fast and dynamic frontend, while Strapi gives us an easy-to-use and customizable CMS. With this setup, you can create a blog that is both easy to manage and a great user experience for your readers.