Serverless Edge: Turbocharge Your Full Stack App with Next.js, Cloudflare Workers, and KV Storage

Serverless Edge: Turbocharge Your Full Stack App with Next.js, Cloudflare Workers, and KV Storage

In recent years, serverless edge computing has gained traction as an efficient and cost-effective solution for deploying applications with high performance and unlimited scalability. In this tutorial, we will explore how to leverage cutting-edge technologies like Next.js, Cloudflare Workers, and Cloudflare KV Storage to deploy a full-stack web application with blazing-fast performance and a global presence.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes that you have basic knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Familiarity with Next.js, React.js, and serverless computing will be helpful but is not required. To start, ensure you have the following tools installed on your system:

Step 1: Setting Up Next.js

Our journey begins by creating a new Next.js app. If you don't have Next.js installed, you can install it using npm or Yarn:

npm install -g create-next-app
  

Now, create a new Next.js project with the following command:

create-next-app my-serverless-edge-app
cd my-serverless-edge-app
  

Step 2: Creating a Simple App

For this tutorial, we will build a simple web application that displays a list of users fetched from a JSON API. Open the pages/index.js file and replace its content with the following:


import { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

const Index = () => {
  const [users, setUsers] = useState([]);

  useEffect(() => {
    const fetchUsers = async () => {
      const response = await fetch('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users');
      const usersData = await response.json();
      setUsers(usersData);
    };

    fetchUsers();
  }, []);

  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Users</h1>
      <ul>
        {users.map(user => (
          <li key={user.id}>{user.name}</li>
        ))}
      </ul>
    </div>
  );
};

export default Index;
  

Start your development server using the following command:

npm run dev
  

Visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser, and you should see a list of users fetched from the API.

Step 3: Deploying with Cloudflare Workers

Now that we have a simple Next.js app, let's deploy it using Cloudflare Workers. First, sign up for a Cloudflare account if you don't already have one. Then, install the Cloudflare Workers CLI tool, wrangler, using npm:

npm install -g @cloudflare/wrangler
  

Authenticate Wrangler with your Cloudflare account:

wrangler login
  

Create a new Wrangler configuration in your Next.js project by running the following command:

wrangler init --site
  

This command will create a new wrangler.toml file in the project directory. Open it and replace its content with the following. Make sure to replace YOUR_CF_ACCOUNT_ID with your actual Cloudflare account ID:


name = "my-serverless-edge-app"
type = "webpack"
account_id = "YOUR_CF_ACCOUNT_ID"
  [[kv_namespaces]]
binding = "MY_KV_STORE"
  

Next, install the following dependencies to your project:

npm install cloudflare-worker-next cloudflare-workers-kv secrets-loader dotenv-webpack --save-dev
  

Step 4: Configuring Webpack and Wrangler

Create a new webpack.config.js file in your project root and add the following content:


const Dotenv = require('dotenv-webpack');

module.exports = {
  target: 'webworker',
  entry: './workers/index.js',
  plugins: [new Dotenv()],
};
  

Create a new workers directory and place an index.js file inside it with the following content:


import createServer from 'cloudflare-worker-next';

const server = createServer();

addEventListener('fetch', event => {
  event.respondWith(server(event.request));
});
  

Finally, modify your package.json with the following scripts:


"scripts": {
  ...
  "build-worker": "NODE_ENV=production next build && NODE_ENV=production wrangler publish",
  "dev-worker": "wrangler dev"
}
  

Step 5: Deploying Your App

It's time to deploy your full-stack web application! Run the following command to build and deploy your app to Cloudflare:

npm run build-worker
  

Your app should now be deployed and globally available at your Worker's URL, which is displayed in the CLI output.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to deploy a serverless full-stack web application using Next.js, Cloudflare Workers, and KV Storage. This powerful combination of technologies allows developers to easily create and deploy applications that are fast, scalable, and globally accessible. By leveraging serverless edge computing, developers can focus on crafting amazing user experiences without worrying about server maintenance or scaling issues.