next.js/examples/with-redux

Redux example

How to use

Download the example or clone the repo:

curl https://codeload.github.com/zeit/next.js/tar.gz/master | tar -xz --strip=2 next.js-master/examples/with-redux
cd with-redux

Install it and run:

npm install
npm run dev

Deploy it to the cloud with now (download)

now

The idea behind the example

Usually splitting your app state into pages feels natural but sometimes you'll want to have global state for your app. This is an example on how you can use redux that also works with our universal rendering approach. This is just a way you can do it but it's not the only one.

In this example we are going to display a digital clock that updates every second. The first render is happening in the server and then the browser will take over. To illustrate this, the server rendered clock will have a different background color than the client one.

Our page is located at pages/index.js so it will map the route /. To get the initial data for rendering we are implementing the static method getInitialProps, initializing the redux store and dispatching the required actions until we are ready to return the initial state to be rendered.

Connect every page to redux like you normally do using nextConnect function. nextConnect provides the same abilities of connect, in addition, it wraps every page with react-redux Provider. For safety it is recommended to wrap all pages, no matter if they use Redux or not, so that you should not care about it anymore in all child components. For normal components, you just need to use connect of react-redux instead of nextConnect.

nextConnect is generated by nextConnectRedux, which accepts makeStore as first argument, all other arguments are internally passed to react-redux connect() function. makeStore function will receive initialState as one argument and should return a new instance of redux store each time when called, no memoization needed here. See the full example in the next-connect-redux repository.

To pass the initial state from the server to the client we pass it as a prop called initialState so then it's available when the client takes over.

The trick here for supporting universal redux is to separate the cases for the client and the server. When we are on the server we want to create a new store every time, otherwise different users data will be mixed up. If we are in the client we want to use always the same store. That's what we accomplish on store.js

The clock, under components/Clock.js, has access to the state using the connect function from react-redux. In this case Clock is a direct child from the page but it could be deep down the render tree.