Prerequisites
The Next.js static MDX website Prerequisites chapter is for beginners
For example, if you already have a GitHub account, then you can skip that step, or if you prefer to install another IDE than the one I suggest, then feel free to do so
First, we need a GitHub account to store our code in a GitHub repository (if you prefer to use another service like GitLab or Bitbucket, feel free to do so), having our code on GitHub will make it easy to access our code on multiple devices, it will serve as a backup in case something happens to our local copy and it will also allow us to share our code with others (in the future)
Later on, we will use GitHub to sign in to services like Vercel.com, which we will use to set up an automatic CI/CD pipeline that will automatically deploy our code. To sign up for a Sentry.io account which we will use for error monitoring so that when a user encounters a bug, it gets listed with a stack trace in Sentry.io.
After creating a GitHub account, we need to create a repository on GitHub for our Code:
Next, we need to install git, which is a version control tool that VSCode will use to synchronize our local code with our remote repository:
Next, to be able to write code, we need an Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
My preferred IDE to write Javascript (Typescript) code is VSCode (Visual Studio Code):
Now we need to sign in to our GitHub account in VSCode and use the VSCode source control tool to make a local clone of our GitHub repository:
To be able to create a Javascript backend and run our Javascript code locally, we need to install the Node.js runtime (which comes with npm which we will use to manage our node_modules packages):
The Next.js 14 "app directory features" require Node.js v18.17 or later, so if you skipped the Node.js installation document because you already have Node.js installed, then just make sure you have a version installed that is high enough
To check what version is currently installed, you can use following command: node -v
The road to React 19 and Next.js 15
React and Next.js have evolved a lot lately 🚀
The most notable additions are server components and (server) actions. With those new features came a lot of changes for how we devs build Next.js apps/websites, which is why I did a separate blog post "The road to React 19 and Next.js 15" where I list what changed during the last +-3 years in the React and Next.js ecosystem
If you have not built a project with Next.js 13/14/15 and React 18/19 yet, and want to catch up with all the new features that got added lately both in React and Next.js, then I recommend you check it out, but if you are already an expert, feel free to skip it 😉