next.js/examples/custom-server/README.md

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# Custom server example

## How to use

### Using `create-next-app`

Download [`create-next-app`](https://github.com/segmentio/create-next-app) to bootstrap the example:

```
npm i -g create-next-app
create-next-app --example custom-server custom-server-app
```

### Download manually

Download the example [or clone the repo](https://github.com/zeit/next.js):

```bash
curl https://codeload.github.com/zeit/next.js/tar.gz/canary | tar -xz --strip=2 next.js-canary/examples/custom-server
cd custom-server
```

Install it and run:

```bash
npm install
npm run dev
```

Deploy it to the cloud with [now](https://zeit.co/now) ([download](https://zeit.co/download))

```bash
now
```

## The idea behind the example

Most of the times the default Next server will be enough but sometimes you want to run your own server to customize routes or other kind of the app behavior. Next provides a [Custom server and routing](https://github.com/zeit/next.js#custom-server-and-routing) so you can customize as much as you want.

The example shows a server that serves the component living in `pages/a.js` when the route `/b` is requested and `pages/b.js` when the route `/a` is accessed. This is obviously a non-standard routing strategy. You can see how this custom routing is being made inside `server.js`.