Building a Full-Stack Web Application with Next.js

Next.js is a popular React framework that helps in building full-stack web applications. In this article, we will focus on creating the UI design work for our web app.

Setting Up Your Next.js Project

Before we can start working on the UI design, we need to set up our Next.js project. You can do this by running the following command in your terminal:


npx create-next-app my-app


This will create a new Next.js project in a directory called “my-app”. You can then navigate to this directory and start the development server by running:


cd my-app
npm run dev


Creating UI Components

Next.js allows us to create reusable UI components that can be used throughout our web app. For example, we can create a Button component like this:


import React from 'react';

const Button = ({ text, onClick }) => {
return <button onClick={onClick}>{text};
};

export default Button;


We can then use this Button component in our pages like this:


import Button from '../components/Button';

const HomePage = () => {
return (
<div>
<h1>Welcome to our web app!</h1>
<Button text="Click me" onClick={() => alert('Button clicked!')} />
</div>
);
};

export default HomePage;


Styling with CSS

In addition to creating UI components, we can also style our web app using CSS. Next.js supports CSS modules which allows us to scope our styles to specific components. For example, we can create a styles.module.css file like this:


.button {
background-color: #007bff;
color: white;
padding: 10px 20px;
border: none;
border-radius: 5px;
cursor: pointer;
}


We can then import this CSS module in our Button component like this:


import styles from '../styles.module.css';

const Button = ({ text, onClick }) => {
return <button className={styles.button} onClick={onClick}>{text};
};


With this setup, we can now start building the UI design work for our full-stack web application with Next.js. Happy coding!