Creating and Launching a Modern Next.js 14 Application with React, Next JS 14, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS

In this tutorial, we will go over how to build and deploy a modern Next.js 14 application using React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. Next.js is a popular React framework that allows you to build server-side rendered web applications with ease. TypeScript is a statically typed superset of JavaScript that helps catch errors early in the development process. Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that helps you quickly design your web applications without writing custom CSS styles.

Before we get started, make sure you have Node.js and npm installed on your machine. You can download and install Node.js from the official website (https://nodejs.org/). Once you have Node.js installed, you can create a new Next.js project by running the following command:

npx create-next-app@14 my-next-app

This will create a new Next.js project with the latest version of Next.js (14) and all the necessary dependencies. Once the project is created, you can navigate to the project directory and start the development server by running the following commands:

cd my-next-app
npm run dev

This will start the development server on http://localhost:3000, and you should see the default Next.js landing page in your browser. Now, let’s go ahead and install TypeScript and Tailwind CSS in our project.

To install TypeScript, run the following command:

npm install --save-dev typescript @types/react @types/node

Next, we need to create a tsconfig.json file in the root of our project with the following configuration:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "esnext",
    "module": "esnext",
    "strict": true,
    "jsx": "preserve",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true
  }
}

To install Tailwind CSS, run the following commands:

npm install --save-dev tailwindcss@latest postcss@latest autoprefixer@latest
npx tailwindcss init -p

This will create a tailwind.config.js and postcss.config.js file in the root of our project. Next, we need to configure Tailwind CSS to work with Next.js by updating the postcss.config.js file with the following configuration:

module.exports = {
  plugins: {
    tailwindcss: {},
    autoprefixer: {},
  },
}

Now that we have TypeScript and Tailwind CSS set up in our project, let’s update our Next.js pages to use TypeScript and Tailwind CSS. You can create a new page in the pages directory with a .tsx extension to use TypeScript and import Tailwind CSS classes for styling.

Here’s an example of a simple TypeScript page with Tailwind CSS styling:

import { FC } from 'react'

const Home: FC = () => {
  return (
    <div className='bg-gray-100 p-4'>
      <h1 className='text-4xl font-bold text-center'>Welcome to my Next.js App!</h1>
    </div>
  )
}

export default Home

Finally, to build and deploy our Next.js application, you can run the following command:

npm run build
npm run start

This will build your Next.js application for production and start the server on http://localhost:3000. To deploy your Next.js application to a hosting provider, you can use services like Vercel, Netlify, or AWS Amplify, which provide seamless deployment for Next.js applications.

That’s it! You have successfully built and deployed a modern Next.js 14 application using React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. I hope this tutorial was helpful, and happy coding!