Create a Next.js App

Setup

First, let’s make sure that your development environment is ready.

  • If you don’t have Node.js installed, install it from here. You’ll need Node.js version 10.13 or later.
  • You’ll be using your own text editor and terminal app for this tutorial.

If you are on Windows, we recommend downloading Git for Windows and use Git Bash that comes with it, which supports the UNIX-specific commands in this tutorial.

Create a Next.js app

To create a Next.js app, open your terminal, cd into the directory you’d like to create the app in, and run the following command:

npx create-next-app nextjs-blog --use-npm --example "https://github.com/vercel/next-learn-starter/tree/master/learn-starter"

Under the hood, this uses the tool called create-next-app, which bootstraps a Next.js app for you. It uses this template through the --example flag.

If it doesn’t work, please take a look at this page.

Run the development server

You now have a new directory called nextjs-blog. Let’s cd into it:

cd nextjs-blog

Then, run the following command:

npm run dev

This starts your Next.js app’s "development server" (more on this later) on port 3000.

Let’s check to see if it’s working. Open http://localhost:3000 from your browser.

Quick Review: What text do you see on the page?