NextJS Tutorial: Routing & Navigation

NextJS is a popular React framework that helps in building server-side rendered applications. In this tutorial, we will focus on routing and navigation in NextJS, along with adding a NavBar to our application.

Routing in NextJS

NextJS uses a file-based routing system, which means that each page is represented by a separate file inside the “pages” directory. For example, to create a new page in our NextJS application, we simply create a new file inside the “pages” directory and NextJS will automatically handle the routing for us.

NextJS also supports dynamic routing, which allows us to create pages with dynamic URLs. We can create dynamic routes by adding square brackets to the file name, for example “[id].js”. This allows us to access the dynamic value from the URL using the useRouter hook.

Navigation in NextJS

NextJS provides a built-in Link component that we can use for client-side navigation. We simply import the Link component from “next/link” and use it to create navigation links between different pages in our application. This helps in improving the performance of our application by preloading the linked page in the background.

Adding a NavBar

To create a NavBar in our NextJS application, we can simply create a new component for our NavBar and then include it in our layout. We can use HTML and CSS to style our NavBar and use the Link component from NextJS for navigation links inside the NavBar.

Here’s an example of how we can create a simple NavBar component in our NextJS application:

    
      import Link from 'next/link';

      const NavBar = () => {
        return (
          
        );
      }

      export default NavBar;
    
  

Once we have created our NavBar component, we can include it in our layout or individual pages by simply importing it and including it in the JSX markup.

Conclusion

NextJS provides a simple and efficient way to handle routing and navigation in our React applications. By leveraging the file-based routing system and the built-in Link component, we can easily create dynamic and responsive applications with NextJS.