next.js/examples/with-redux

Redux example

How to use

Download the example:

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

or clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/zeit/next.js.git --depth=1
cd next.js/examples/with-redux

Install the dependencies:

npm install

Run the dev server:

npm run dev

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. The root component for the render method is the react-redux Provider that allows us to send the store down to children components so they can access to the state when required.

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.