Serve your pages faster than ever in Next.js

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Next.js is one of the frameworks of React.js which provides a bunch of features inbuilt in it and very popular to make an app server-side rendered.

A brief about Server Side Rendering (aka SSR):-

As the name speaks it itself, in server-side rendering pages renders in the server and then loads in the browser. which is highly recommended to improve the SEO of the site. Here is a detailed article.

If you see in the above article, SSR needs to be implemented in React.js while in Next.js it comes as one feature.

What's the problem of SSR?

Well if you are serving static pages from SSR then it'll not cause many problems for you but while making dynamic pages where information is being filled through any type of API then It'll start to cause problems of timing to first render(TTFB).

It means when you request any page to the server. first, it'll trigger used Next.js Data fetcher to request data from other servers and wait until it's received and then it'll create and return the page back to the browser. So, till then every user has to stare at a white screen or beautiful loader. The problem is, in most cases, we are requesting the same data from the server, and the user has to wait again and again.

Solution

Simply we can cache our rendered pages on the server and use it for next time. We can enable this caching into our custom server of Next.js. Now, let's see how to do it with minimal efforts. 🤔

Next Redis Cache

Next Redis Cache is a package to provide caching of next.js pages with all needed controls. so, let me share how we can use it?

Installation :

Use the package manager npm or yarn to install next-redis-cache.

npm install next-redis-cache --save

with yarn package manager.

yarn add next-redis-cache

Use inside the custom server

Inside of the custom server, you will need Redis Database initialized as described for example.

Use as a middleware

server.js

const express = require('express')
const next = require('next')
const NextRedisCache = require('next-redis-cache')


const port = process.env.PORT || 3000
const development = process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production'
const app = next({ dev: development })
const handler = app.getRequestHandler()
const client = redis.createClient()

/**
 *  Initialization of Next Redis Cache instance
 */
const nextRedisCache = new NextRedisCache(client, app, {
  includes: ['/'],  // routes to include for caching
})

app
  .prepare()
  .then(() => {
    const server = express()

    server.get('*', 
      (request, response, nxt) => nextRedisCache.middleware(request, response, nxt), 
      (request, response) => handler(request, response)
    )

    /* starting server */
    return server.listen(port, error => {
      if (error) throw error
      console.log(`> Ready on http://localhost:${port}`)
    })
  })
  .catch(error => new Error("Server isn't responded", error))

Use as a handler

To use Next Redis Cache as a request handler just replace Next.js app's handler with nextRedisCache.handler in above snippet, as give in-below.

server.js

    server.get('*', (request, response) =>
      nextRedisCache.handler(request, response)
    )

Here, an Instance of NextRedisCache initialized with three arguments as following.

Name	Type	Required	Default
Client	Redis Client	✅
App	Next.js App	✅
Config	Configuration Object	❌	{}

Configuration

Next Redis Cache comes with some extra controls to manage your Redis database and page's caching. ( it's all in your hand ).

All you need to know about the config object.

Key	Detail	Type	Example	Default
includes	Collection of specific routes which should be cache.	Array	['/', '/blogs/(.*)']	[]
excludes	Collection of specific routes that shouldn't be cached.	Array	['/cart', '/(.*).js']	[*]
defaultExpire	Expiration time to expire your cache after a particular time. Note: `null` value of this key will set the cache permanently.	Number (Seconds)	3000	null
expire	To define different expiration times for different routes.	Number (Seconds)	3000	null
cache	To disable caching permanently by setting it false.	Boolean	true	true
prefix	To identify your cache in-store by the unique prefix.	String	"my-cache"	"my-cache"
log	Log timing of get/set to monitor caching	Boolean	true	false

Rajnish Katharotiya